Verizon Adds Yet Another Activation Fee For New Customers

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Obviously companies like Verizon will continue to do stuff like this as long as people keep giving them their money. Maybe it's time to start voting with your wallet.

It’s not the new $20 monthly bump in the cost of unlimited data, for those who have it. Nor is it the $20 monthly fee Verizon charges customers just for having a smartphone on any given line (on top of the data charges). No, it’s another new, different $20 fee.
 
Yay! Go ahead and push your customers to ditch you.

From the incompetent people in the VZ stores to them adding fees and reducing service, I am heavily leaning towards ditching VZ very soon.
 
Been using Project Fi with a Nexus 6 for the past few weeks while I still have a Verizon account with LG G3. Been taking both around to the places I go to see which works best. Considering how many places Verizon just does not work and the ever increasing cost, I will be leaving Verizon once my contract expires. No way they can keep me. Been with Verizon for over a decade now but this relationship is over.
 
My wife is on Virgin Wireless, and I'm on H20. No real problems with either and a total bill less than $60 for both.
 
I never went to Verizon, because they were always more expensive. Now they just seem to want to get rid of a lot of their members by price gouging everything and everyone. I am sure they will re-think it when they see a huge loss in phone sales/2 year contracts....
 
If you've ever been in a Verizon store you will understand. The intellect of the average cellular customer is unbelievably low. They see the new phone and don't care what the cost, they just want to be liked by their friends.

This country is so full of uninformed consumers that companies like Verizon will continue to flourish.
 
It's only a matter of time for a New Fee Pricing Research Fee.
 
I'll help:

Fee Processing Fee
Fee Tracking Fee
Fee Waiver Fee
Fee Inquiry Call Fee
Automatic Fee Payment Fee

Call me Verizon!
 
They just hit me with a $40 "upgrade fee" when I got a new tablet (to replace one that was already on Verizon). It's pretty stupid since all I had to do was move the SIM card over.

Spoke to a rep who said they'd wave it, but that they needed to have another rep do that. Transferred me to that person, who then refused to do it. They advised me that the fee was necessary to provide me with free services like the "My Verizon" webpage and app. Obviously this is nonsense, which I told them. I also said I'd drop them as a carrier over the fee, so they'd be losing my $232 per month. He said .. ok.

I'm in process of porting out now.
 
From the article:

Update: Verizon has yet to respond to us, but additional sources are under the impression that this may only be for new lines only, not existing lines. We’ll continue to update this post as we have more.
Click to expand...

That sounds more likely. Which means it has zero effect on existing customers. They may be doing it since, without contracts, there may be seeing an increase in the number of people hopping from service to service.

Personally, I was a longtime VZW customer, and then left to go to T-Mobile. TMO service was so horrific outside of major urban areas that I left and went back. I found the cost difference to be well worth having reliable service. YMMV.
 
Google Project Fi.

Get you a bad ass $300 Nexus 6 that auto updates to Marsh Mellow v6

You get two networks, Sprint and T-Mobile

AND .. ( drum-roll ) your bills are pretty damn cheap even with a little data use
 
Ditched them last week to go to Project Fi -- it's cheaper and I have a Nexus 6P so I'm Winning.


Fuck Verizon -- outside of the fees, they made it hard as FUCK to pay your final bill. They disable your entire MyVerizon account that you normally use to pay online with, calling them, I get disconnected... its like they don't want their final $220 dollars


Yeah I had a 200 dollar early termination fee, was totally worth it to get away from them.
 
I suppose it depends on whether you need unlimited data or not, but our whole family switched from ATT to Cricket recently. Oddly, it's the same network. Cricket is owned by ATT. We cancelled at one store, walked two doors down to Cricket, and signed up again.

3 phones. 2.5GB for each, unlimited talk, unlimited LD, unlimited text. No contract. No fees. Month to Month $90 for all 3 of us.

If you DO go over your data limit with Cricket guess what? It's OK... it just dumps you back to 1G speeds and no overage charges. So you even still actually HAVE internet, just not high speed. So you can still check mail or do basic surfing. How absolutely REASONABLE.

Go figure.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Ditched them last week to go to Project Fi -- it's cheaper and I have a Nexus 6P so I'm Winning.


Fuck Verizon -- outside of the fees, they made it hard as FUCK to pay your final bill. They disable your entire MyVerizon account that you normally use to pay online with, calling them, I get disconnected... its like they don't want their final $220 dollars


Yeah I had a 200 dollar early termination fee, was totally worth it to get away from them.
Click to expand...

lol, I remember going through this. Why on earth would they immediately shut down your account except to intentionally screw with you. Just don't ever get service for only a hot spot. You cant register for your account because the device can't get text messages. You have to call them numerous times to get them to mail you a temporary passcode. This kind of stuff blows my mind.
 
Ditched them last month over the unlimited price hike. Went to Cricket & get 10Gb for $55. Coverage is actually better on the ATT network. My Verizon phone actually gets full LTE.
 
Failfish ,Verizon. Keep nickel and diming us and see how many decide to go elsewhere.
 
jcollett said:
Been using Project Fi with a Nexus 6 for the past few weeks while I still have a Verizon account with LG G3. Been taking both around to the places I go to see which works best. Considering how many places Verizon just does not work and the ever increasing cost, I will be leaving Verizon once my contract expires. No way they can keep me. Been with Verizon for over a decade now but this relationship is over.
Click to expand...

The thing that often surprises people, I've found, is that despite Verizon supposedly having the best coverage... it's really not that great. I had dead spots in the city quite often when I was on Verizon. Just places where I'd be waiting for the bus and find I have zero signal to even browse Reddit with while I waited.

Never had that problem with Sprint.

Even when I was on tour with a band, I had pretty damn good coverage for the whole weekend. All the ones using AT&T and T-Mobile connected to my phone as a hotspot because I had the most contiguous service.

Yeah. Sprint's slow. But they're also more usable in places where other carriers simply don't exist. (Likely a combination of CDMA propagation and frequencies that Sprint uses)

And the phones on prepaid aren't too shabby now. LG G3 on Boost. Not being able to bring your own device does suck for some and that's where I would say just go to Cricket.

$30/mo for 4GB unthrottled, throttled to 3G after, unlimited talk and text. With that kind of a deal, why the fuck would I subject myself to Verizon again?
 
Still the best network in my area. I'll pay the extra whatever. I can't get service with AT&T, Sprint, TMo or anything else while on the lakes.
 
I left verizon years ago for their nickel and dime increases in my invoice.
Every month it seemed to go up a here and there, until it was dollars above the starting point.
Turns out, they can add 'fees' with little regulation, so I would have things like municipal access fee ... 1.05, County maintenance fee... 1.82 things like that.. I used to think it was TAXES, but not, it was FEEs with official-sounding names. Taxes was just one if I remember correctly. I think this was how my invoice always went up, although the voice/text/data was all the same money.
I guess now with their 'simplyfied' billing they dont do 50cent more and more, but 20$ here and there.. awesome.. I guess it is simpler.
 
Advil said:
I suppose it depends on whether you need unlimited data or not, but our whole family switched from ATT to Cricket recently. Oddly, it's the same network. Cricket is owned by ATT. We cancelled at one store, walked two doors down to Cricket, and signed up again.

3 phones. 2.5GB for each, unlimited talk, unlimited LD, unlimited text. No contract. No fees. Month to Month $90 for all 3 of us.

If you DO go over your data limit with Cricket guess what? It's OK... it just dumps you back to 1G speeds and no overage charges. So you even still actually HAVE internet, just not high speed. So you can still check mail or do basic surfing. How absolutely REASONABLE.

Go figure.
Click to expand...

You forgot to mention 4G speed is limited to 8mb. That being said...

I am also in the process of porting over. Found ATT service is better in most of the non-urban places I go (Where mobile is the only internet).

Also happy with the cost. 5 lines 2.5gb of data each for $100. Even with 2 lines you save $30 from direct ATT (but at the cost of net speed of course).

For my mobile usage 8mb is plenty fast for me at least.

Cricket support is a bit horrible, you will get different answers from each rep. I would suggest you go to a store and pay the extra connection fees or use the web. Don't try and buy a sim and activate it online etc, while it can work there are many pitfalls. Stick with standard methods and hope you don't have technical issues cause support is pretty horrible at least online.
 
dceremuga said:
If you've ever been in a Verizon store you will understand. The intellect of the average cellular customer is unbelievably low. They see the new phone and don't care what the cost, they just want to be liked by their friends.

This country is so full of uninformed consumers that companies like Verizon will continue to flourish.
Click to expand...

This is why the presumption that people will "vote with their wallets" always rubs me the wrong way--it seldom happens on a wide enough scale to matter.

Yes, us tech-savvy people often do, but the majority of consumers don't because they don't want the hassle of changing something. Others simply don't care. If the market provides no negative feedback, then companies operating in it assume there's nothing wrong with what they're doing.
 
why does anyone still use the big provider when you can piggy back on them with much cheaper subproviders?
 
My bill is up to $380 a month for 4 phones with Verizon. I just cant afford it anymore. I have got to get something else soon for the other three in my family. I'm going to try to keep mine with Verizon (Unlimited) for as long as I can. Leaning toward T-Mobile or Metro PCS.
 
Verizon is the only one with good service in my area. But honestly if I didn't need my phone to be a smart phone for my job, I would just go back to a flip. Honestly I'm just sick of Verizon with a smart phone.
 
Ting or Republic - both operate on the Sprint network though - but there's no comparison with the prices.
 
I left T-Mo 6 years ago because of a lack of coverage, went to sprint when they were decent still and finally went to Verizon three years ago. I would happily be back at T-Mo, if I trusted their network.
 
Nimisys said:
I left T-Mo 6 years ago because of a lack of coverage, went to sprint when they were decent still and finally went to Verizon three years ago. I would happily be back at T-Mo, if I trusted their network.
Click to expand...

I've had no problem with T-Mobile's coverage here in Southern California, Seattle or even in Alaska (tourist areas). Even better was their free texting and free limited data in Canada which was great for the couple days I was in Vancouver.

T-Mobile's coverage is a lot better than it was 6 years ago. T-Mobile scored a lot of cash from AT&T due to the failed merger, and they spent it on upgrading their network.
 
Will be looking at TmO when our current contract is up.
 
Half way through a VZW contract as part of a family plan; was forced away from ATT by others on the plan who moved and claimed it "didn't work" where they were going. Joke's on them -- VZW service there is just as bad, maybe worse, and they had a ATT microcell but were too cheap to spend $50/month for broadband in 2 places... only to discover VZW cost them much more than that over ATT per month for weaker service. Hoping my financial situation will improve before the end of the contract and I'll just go to my own plan, as being slave to the whims of idiots to save like $20/month just isn't cutting it anymore.
 
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