Verizon Wireless has announced several changes to how upgrades work for its postpaid customers. In the past, customers were able to get upgrade pricing 20 months into an existing contract in exchange for extending the contract by two years. That deal is over. Instead, customers will have to wait for the entire length of the contract to expire before being eligible for upgrade prices. Here’s an excerpt from a post by Verizon’s executive director of corporate communications Brenda Raney:
In alignment with the terms of the contract, customers on a two-year agreement will be eligible for an upgrade at 24 months vs. today’s early upgrade eligibility at 20 months. This change aligns the upgrade date with the contract end date and is consistent with how the majority of customers purchase new phones today.
In the immortal words of Lando Calrissian, “This deal is getting worse all the time!”
Some tech pundits have speculated that Verizon’s chief competitor, AT&T, will follow suit. Many also believe that the Sprint and T-Mobile, the (distant) third- and fourth-largest carriers in the U.S., will capitalize on the move and emphasize the more lenient terms each company offers.
For you Verizon customers out there, does this change your view on the company? Are you less likely to renew your contract because of the new terms? Or is it not a big deal to you?
Source via Droid-Life
I love that clip you chose.
This doesn’t really change how I feel about Verizon, because honestly I never really cared about getting an upgrade a month or two in advance (I think I rarely took advantage of it anyways). My big decision with Verizon will be how long we end up keeping our contract with them, or what we do next, since we have an unlimited data plan still. I know we don’t use crazy amounts of data, and we could fit everything in on a tiered plan, but I would rather hold out just because I don’t think unlimited data is something they should have gotten rid of. A tiered plan also severely limits those rare times when we do need a lot of data, like when I drove for 17 hours straight using Google navigation while streaming Google music and driving through the Smokey mountains to the Carolina’s last summer. If we switched to a tiered plan of 4gb shared between our two lines then we really wouldn’t be saving much money ($10-$20 I think) and we would both have to really cut back on our data usage.
My wife might feel differently about the upgrade times being changed, but Verizon has too many other issues to work out for me to really care about this one. I think last time we tried to upgrade a phone they tried charging us a $35 fee for upgrading, or something equally ridiculous. I want to leave their services so badly because of how frustrating it is to be their customer, but at the same time I do love the quality of their network.