The Full Spectrum
I have written before about my old problem’s with Verizon and AT&T and trying to cancel services that these companies simply don’t want to cancel. They seem to have a business model predicated less on keeping customers happy than on making sure that it is as hard as humanly possible to cancel their service and thus stop paying them their monthly tariff. Usually, after holding incessantly on the phone for a representative, you are told you need to go to a physical location and then those phone store people treat you like you have the Plague and want nothing to do with you. I thought I had found a solution several years ago when we had the house in Ithaca. After years of suffering with lousy internet connectivity, I finally paid to have cable connected to the somewhat remote house. The only saving grace was that I was able to split the cost with my then neighbor only to get kicked out of the house a year later. During that year is when I ran afoul of the Verizon people, so I switched over to Spectrum. Spectrum was the cable company I used in Ithaca and they came on like gangbusters with a plan to bundle all my family cell phones and iPads onto Spectrum Mobile. Spectrum didn’t have its own cellular tower system, but apparently as part of the general telecommunications deregulation protocol, they are allowed to sell cellular service off the back of the Verizon network. So that seemed like a perfect situation for me. I would get the Verizon network without the Verizon people that I had come to hate.
We have two iPads and three phones on the Spectrum Mobile system and have had no problem with it over the last four or five years. Recently I had reason to check my monthly bill, which is all done on Autopay with an email notice. In other words, I get no physical bill, which is not surprising since I hardly get any physical bills anymore. I decided to get on the phone with the Spectrum people to correct the fact that my billing statement (which I called up online) still had my old Ithaca address on it. It was clear that it didn’t matter so much since their bills were getting paid and our service seemed to be working just fine, but I sensed that it was better to keep the books and records straight. When I got hold of a service representative I explained to her that I had started using Spectrum because of my need for cable for internet in Ithaca, which explained the Ithaca address. I explained that I chose to expand the relationship to the mobile side of their shop and had put myself on their family plan for all our iPhones and iPads., but had terminated the cable service last year when we turned the Ithaca house back over to the University. The dutiful phone representative immediately seized on the opening to try to sell me on reestablishing my cable service with Spectrum out here on the hilltop. She was just barely deterred when she learned, first from me and then from looking it up, that Spectrum does not offer service to this address. Once she realized there was no cable sale to be made to me, I asked her to please change my listed address of record. She spent a moment trying and then declared that it was not possible. It seems that the Spectrum systems are entirely focused on cable and that mobile is just a recent supplemental service. As such, the Spectrum people had not contemplated a client who had mobile and no cable. Without the core cable relationship and its incumbent data profile, the mobile service could not stand. Furthermore, the core cable service address, given that cable could only be activated on a fixed location, could not be changed once established unless it was moved to a new address. That was obviously impossible in my circumstance given that we were only using mobile and mobile was just a subset of the cable service, whether it existed or not.
I decided I could live with the failings of the Spectrum system so I retreated to fight another day when the stakes would be higher. Not long after that, Kim told me that she wanted an early Christmas present, she wanted a new phone. Kim is no frivolous broad, she was sporting an iPhone 11, which means that it was four years old and just for good measure, it had a cracked screen, so it was time for a replacement. I know how this works and I know it is always best to use the carrier loyalty programs to your benefit. There are probably more cellular customers lost to hardware offers by competitors, so I suspected that Spectrum would have the best deal, not to mention that the phone would be set up for the Spectrum system. That last constraint is not as difficult as it used to be, but its still an issue. Sure enough, Spectrum had a deal that gave me about a $100 benefit as an existing customer, but it came on the trade-in of the old phone, which was fine by me. There is absolutely no reason not to let the carriers have the old phones to send off to West Africa or wherever. I went through the whole order procedure until I was told that they were only allowed to send the newly ordered phones to the address of record. I explained to the representative why that would not work and she was suddenly stumped. She was simply unable to mail the ordered equipment anywhere else and was equally unable to change my address. I couldn’t do anything to make it work and so I was suddenly at the dead end of the spectrum.
I had already checked the CostCo pricing on the iPhone 15 that Kim wanted and knew that this was one of the few markets that CostCo could not give advantage to their clients. That meant that my next stop was the mother ship itself, Apple online. Naturally, Apple has pre-programmed phones for sale for Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile and then Un-programmed phones for sale for the rest of the carriers like Spectrum. I spoke to both an Apple representative and a Spectrum representative to make sure that would work and was assured that it was an easy process to set up once you had the phone in your hands. So I went ahead and ordered the phone Kim wanted and when it got to the trade-in details, after I answered all the questions about the condition of the existing phone. That’s when I found out that I would be getting $100 less on my trade-in than I would have with Spectrum (note to self – it might be worth writing to Spectrum for some satisfaction on all that to get the discount I so richly deserve).
Apple promised to send me the new phone, the extra accessories I ordered (the new USB-C charging cable renders all existing chargers useless) and a box for the old phone trade-in. These were ordered on a Wednesday and supposed to be delivered on Friday. On Friday, the accessories arrived but then I got a text saying that they had tried to deliver the iPhone, but were unable due to no one being here for a signature. That was a load of crap since both Kim and I were here on the hilltop all day and no one had come looking for a signature. I was on the phone with Apple on Saturday when the empty box for the trade-in phone was delivered. I was told there was nothing to do for a few days since the delivery team didn’t work on the weekends. That hardly seemed fair given the circumstances. On Monday, I called back and raised hell with Apple. All it served to do was get me a credit of $63 for the accessories. I raised more hell on Tuesday. The iPhone arrived on Wednesday and then Apple tried to deliver another iPhone on Thursday (luckily I was able to reject it by talking to the FedEx driver). I’m not sure that extra iPhone would have ever been traced back rather than been written off, but I am too honest to want to wrangle with Apple over a few hundred dollars.
Kim tried last night to activate her new phone and ran into another brick wall at Spectrum. Finally, we were transferred to a tech guy who was able to untangle the whole mess and get Kim set up. I asked if he could change my address of record and he just laughed and asked if I thought he was a magician. It’s been a full spectrum week all around.