I’m currently travelling in the southern areas of the USA. New Orleans for Jazzfest is my primary mission, but I’ve decided to visit a few new places along the way, so I’m currently in Memphis Tennessee. More on that later.
But in the meantime, I felt that I needed to have some means of phone access while I’m travelling, and I decided that T-Mobile was the way to go. I’ve used their services in the past and been quite satisfied with them on those past occasions.
This time however it’s not been a very good experience.
Let’s start with getting a SIM. Should be easy – walk into a store and buy a SIM. $10.
Except that that doesn’t work. You also need an activation kit. And nobody in the store knew anything about that. Nobody!
I ended up buying a whole new phone, with a SIM, and an activation kit, for $15. Cheap, and gave all of …. $3.34 credit. Wow; such a vast amount of credit!
Well, now I was able to activate and use my phone; I returned the unusable SIM to the store for a refund (took over a half hour, but that’s staffing issue at the store) and I was now able to make and receive calls and text messages. Including international texts, to and from Australia.
Activating the call took some time; T-Mobile use a very highly automated system. It works. Sometimes.
But their system also drops calls. Frequently. It happened to me twice; the first time was while trying to activate the phone service. You have to punch in a lot of numbers to activate the phone. I think punching the idiot who designed their system might be appropriate. It’s horrendous.
But I finally got the phone activated. Probably took about 90 minutes for what should be a ten minute process.
But I had no data access.
So I now had to sign up for a data plan. I chose their $30 1500 Talk and text plan, because it promised “1500 Talk & Text with 30 MB data
Use any combination of minutes or messages up to 1500. For e-mails and light web surfing.”.
Fair enough; I’m getting more service, so I need to pay. So I tried to add credit my account with the requisite $30 … from my Australian based credit card account. It seems that their system fails to accept any non-US homed credit card, so every attempt I made to pay the extra amount … failed. I needed to go into a store and buy a prepaid account, and then call them (or go online) and use the purchased card’s value and have that assigned to my account.
Ok, so I finally managed to get that plan activated, let’s look again at what the plan purported to offer:
“1500 Talk & Text with 30 MB data
Use any combination of minutes or messages up to 1500. For e-mails and light web surfing.”.
While that might seem clear to us mere mortals, it wasn’t. International texts cost more. This is apparently buried somewhere in their terms and conditions, and although I asked a customer support representative to point me to exactly where in those Ts&Cs this was stated, he couldn’t locate it either.
And that call mysteriously dropped out.
Apparently, 1500 credits for text and talk doesn’t apply to international texts. Well, it actually does, because the count of texts that were being debited against my account was increasing steadily, and I was only sending texts to Australia, plus a couple of very short local (US) calls.
But then I was no longer able to send international texts. That facility stopped within two days of the service being activated, because, apparently, I had no more credit left on my account.
While they don’t anything, those international texts, in addition to being deducted from my 1500 text and talk balance, were also being deducted – in cash – from any credit that my account may have enjoyed.
Dear Mr T-Mobile: this sort of thing is NOT stated anywhere that I can see in your terms and conditions. Your systems are poorly designed, and your plans are almost as confusing as Australian plans. 1500 Talk and Text should mean exactly that.
Anything else is just plain misrepresentation. Pure and simple.
I’ve asked for their PR people to contact me. I asked for them to get back to me urgently. That hasn’t occurred either.
This is truly a major fail on T-Mobile’s part.
In the interests of just getting on with the job, I purchased another $50 card, wishing to upgrade my account to their “International Unlimited Talk & Text with 100 MB”.
This service promises: “Same great service as our Unlimited Talk & Text with 100 MB data.Plus, unlimited calls to landlines in over 50 countries, and unlimited texting, and discounted calling to over 220 countries.”
Purchasing the $50 card was a joy unto itself: the first three cards we tried in the store failed to validate with the online system The fourth card validated, but then, when I went online, the online systems failed to acknowledge that the PIN’s cvalidity.
Back on the phone again, validate the PIN.
Then to try to upgrade the plan … I can do that online, but that won’t apply until the plan’s next renewal date. Not an acceptable option, so I’m back on the phone, with an eventual satisfactory resolution.
But the overall experience was hell.
Their systems are too heavily reliant upon automation. Finding a warm body to help solve the issues encountered is a real challenge, made even moreso by the fact that their systems … suck.
But my account is now upgraded and hopefully satisfactory.
We shall see; I’m only four days into the trip, and have spent way too much time on the phone with customer support, and getting the systems for the phone sorted.