Cell phone companies trying internet service: three cautionary examples
We were living in a deep fringe suburban area not served by the behemoth Comcast/Xfinity, so for a while we tried Viasat.
It was just barely ok for streaming … I noticed it getting slower toward the end of the month and realized that their agreement allowed throttling the speed when one went over the limit (100 Mb? I can’t remember, but I think that was it.)
I first tried Cricket for a brief sojourn … I had been quite happy with Cricket cell phone service for a couple of years, but the internet service was not their best feature. I remember returning one and getting another little wifi box, but I gave up after a couple of months of challenges.
Then I tried T-Mobile … it worked well for a while, plenty speedy but … they oversold their back end and their DNS was clearly overloaded, the software in their box was not well tested. It had to be rebooted up to 2–3 times per day.
I finally tried Verizon, which I gave up on cell phones in 2003 and was still having the same issue as of 2010. Their internet box has been fast:
Now for more about back end services: T-Mobile has already shown themselves challenged with DNS, and even more of a shock to me: they couldn’t search their database for my account on my (unusual) name. They were supposed to have sent me a prepaid shipping label when I cancelled the account, and that never showed up. I took the box to their retail store, but they said they couldn’t accept it … could not even send me the prepaid shipping label in email.
(I finally got the prepaid shipping label after they called me again and I had to read the (tiny) IMEI number to them to verify myself to them (since remember, they couldn’t search by name.) The called again today even though I told them I would ship it today (and did; goodbye T-Mobile).
As for Verizon: I gave up their cell service in 2003 due to late voicemail messages. (Good decision: this was still happening in 2010.) But their internet service got better reviews than anyone (and doesn’t involve voicemail). So I tried it and have been very happy with its actual internet service.
But they have a different back end problem / opportunity: it doesn’t stay up long enough for them to give you the promised $10 automatic break in their service fees, which I guess is incentive enough for some companies. I’ve been trying for a couple of months and somehow still am paying $60.
Every time I log in I get two or three authorization requests, but then the site breaks down with something like this:
I have tried to get this done at least 5 times but I’ve always had some weird thing happen in the middle of trying.
T-Mobile should at least have incentive to upgrade their back end services; Verizon apparently concludes they have actually the opposite incentive.
$10 a month extra for a better internet service is worth paying, although Verizon is doing “bait-and-switch” by back-end-incompetence.
I’m always on the lookout for some technologically advanced, better, cheaper option … with ChatGPT in play, can this be far down the road now?
