Nice Try
Like everybody these days, my inbox and credit cards are inundated with fees for every service under the sun. The concept of micro fees and subscriptions has become a big issue in modern life. One of the reasons I subscribe to Rocket Money for $8.99/months is that they regularly remind me of all the small and large subscription fees I am being charged, which forces me to reexamine my services on a regular basis. Rocket has helped me to eliminate some (25%?) of those fees and they do most of the legwork in doing so.
Recently I went through a change of cell phone provider, switching from Spectrum Mobile to T-Mobile. I did that because I was being charged $285/month for three lines and three extra devices (Two iPads and one Apple Watch). Strangely enough, between Kim and I, we have only one iPad and two Apple Watches. Kim Long ago abandoned her iPad and I bought an Apple Watch. For some reason, my Apple Watch does not require a separate charge, but Kim’s does. Anyway, I tried to jawbone Spectrum into lowering the fees on the threat of losing my business (something my friend Mike seems to do quite effectively), but Spectrum wasn’t budging, so I went to T-Mobile and went through the process of the changeover, saving what amounts to about $100 per month. While some of that was due to eliminating the extra iPad charge ($20), I also got with the bundle, a reduction to both my Netflix and Apple TV+ monthly bills.
As luck would have it, right after switching over, I broke my iPhone screen due to dropping it. While I tried to get it fixed at an unsanctioned repair shop and it all looked good, the phone stopped working in several ways and started running out of battery early in the day. So, I went to an authorized Apple repair center at Best Buy and was told by the clerk that I might better go for an upgrade to the newest iPhone model rather than go through a complex repair. Best Buy did not have T-Mobile phones so I went back to the T-Mobile store and bought a new iPhone 15 Pro Max. While waiting in the T-Mobile store for my phone to finish its transition, I watched a woman purchase a 5G Gateway and it got me thinking. I asked about the Gateway and was told that T-Mobile had special on the home internet gateway of $40 per month. I was concerned about the level of service bandwidth, but they checked my address and told me I would have excellent reception, presumably because I was on the top of a hill.
I didn’t transact right away, but the thought of eliminating a monthly $185 Cox home internet bill and replacing it with a $40 T-Mobile home internet bill was very enticing. Since I had gone to T-Mobile for my new cell service because that’s who Mike uses, I asked Mike about the home internet service. He was on top of the issue, as I would have expected, and said he was thinking about doing it since it would lower his $77 bill to $40. That got me wondering why I was being charged $185 versus his $77. He claimed that he browbeat Cox down to that price. It caused me to go talk to Cox about lowering my bill, using the $77 “friend” example and the T-Mobile $40 wireless internet offer as sticks to beat them with. Cox was unfazed by my threats, but it did cause me to parse my monthly bill a bit more. It seems that my bill is $120 (compared to Mike’s $77, but he has max speed of 500 Mbps versus my 1,000 Mbps) and I pay an extra $15 for renting my modem/router (I have no clue why Mike doesn’t have that charge), but I have also opted to pay and extra $50 for unlimited data usage.
Mike reminds me that we watch much more TV than he does, so I checked the Cox data usage history. My account gives me 1,280 Gigabytes of data use per month for my $120 but the $50 causes me to not be charged for going over that amount. They charge $10 for every extra 50 Gigabytes of usage in any given month. Over the last three months, I only an over the 1,280 one time and it was by 20 Gigabytes. That was the holiday month when data use was likely as high as at any time during the year. That means, I am paying $50 per month or $600 per year for what may well be only$40-50 of annual overuse of data. I immediately cancelled the $50 unlimited data feature. I felt good about the savings.
Then, I was emboldened to try to further decrease my Cox bill by testing the T-Mobile 5G Gateway, for which they offered a two-week trial. I stopped by and made the purchase and brought the Gateway home to test out. I was immediately worried about this one Gateway serving our entire home, which, being a one-level house, stretches quite a ways from the guest wing all the way to our office at the other end. I started by switching my new iPhone and iPad to the new T-Mobile service, and walking from one end of the house to the other and testing the internet speed and reception. It all seemed good, so I went about the process of changing all five of our TVs to the new wireless WiFi service as well as having Kim switch over her iPhone to that WiFi address. All good.
Then the main living room TV, which I tend to keep on Hulu, my platform for receiving live TV (having switched to streaming from satellite service a few years ago to save about $150 per month in fees). Hulu was kicking me out telling me that I was changing my home location due to the change of my IP address. It wouldn’t let me make the switch without calling them, so I called. They made the switch and explained that their system just needed to be reset for my changing ISP, which they recognize as a change of home location. That all made sense and I figured that it was a one-time change and that I was now good to go.
Not so fast, Abernathy, as the old joke goes. Hulu kicked me out again claiming the same home location change problem. I called again and while they fixed it, they said that T-Mobile’s service changed IP addresses regularly and that I would have to call every time they did that. What? I called my T-Mobile store and they had no clue what I was talking about. I then called T-Mobile technical assistance, who told me that, indeed, they have a dynamic IP protocol that changes IP numbers regularly. I Googled the issues with dynamic IP addresses and T-Mobile home internet service and found that the dynamic versus static IP address issue is not unique to me and does cause an issue. Google told me that the underlying service (Hulu?) would learn to adapt to the dynamic IP issue and that things would settle down and work. This morning, the TVs all had the same change of home location issue. That is now enough for me to determine that my T-Mobile home internet trial is at an end.
It has occurred to me that for $40 per month I could defeat the $50 unlimited overcharge from Cox by having my web browsing on iPhone and iPad done through the T-Mobile WiFi while keeping the TVs on Cox. That redundancy might have some value, but there is something about cutting the cord (or should I say cutting the cable) that the tech world does not yet seem completely ready to have happen. Hey, it was a nice try anyway, right?