My favorite thing is when Telcos say they cannot tell you how much their plan will cost when you sign the contract, but magically, they are able to figure it out when you get your first bill.
Yeah, I recently switched service and prepaid a full year. Not just fewer surprises, but often cheaper.
I still live in a kind of dismayed disbelief at how much money the major cell-phone carriers want for plans they consider normal/budget. This seems to be because they include what is (to me) a crazy amount of cellular data, amounts I'll never use because I don't stream full-length movies on the bus or whatever.
For context, a major local network's "essentials" plan costs $60/month for 50GB of "premium" mobile data and unlimited not-so-premium data. In contrast, a reseller's prepaid plan (on the same infrastructure) comes out to $15/month for 5GB (5G speeds) and a 4gb trickle (LTE) after that.
Since I'm always near Wi-Fi and almost never exceed 2GB/month, it's a no-brainer.
Meanwhile here in Italy rechargeable sims have 10 euros per month plans with unlimited data (which is actually ~1TB but it's not advertised since it's more of a fair use thing) or very high caps (150-200GB)
The biggest issue with being on an MVNO is that your data priority is below all other customers. It’s not even that bad most of the time, but if you go to a congested area like a concert you’ll definitely feel the speed decrease.
It's because the people who make the website aren't the people who manage the billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules. That poor customer service rep has no idea.
>> It's because the people who make the website aren't the people who manage the billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules. That poor customer service rep has no idea.
The customer service rep isnt supposed to have an idea. Neither is the mailman delivering your telco bill, nor the guy stuffing your telco bill into an envelope -- that is a strawman argument.
>> "billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules"
yep, and as I mentioned, the labyrinth magically becomes available to the company during billing, but is somehow "unavailable" a month before when you're signing a binding 2yr agreement. Lets all be honest - it is intentional, because telcos dont want to show customers the prices they are about to pay, they just want to show customers the 3mo promo price w/o tax, w/o regulatory recovery fees, etc.
With usage based they can tell you it will be "base cost + cost/unit", but some carriers will tell you they can't determine the taxes/fees you'll be subject to until you're billed.
It likely wouldn't hold up in court very well, but also you'd have to be able afford that
