Why you should never use T-Mobile

Posted on Thursday, December 04, 2008

Until recently, I have been a T-Mobile customer since 2001. Over the past 8 years, I have bought a new phone almost every year. This past June, it was time again for a new phone, so my wife and I got two shiny new Blackberry Curves. We decided these phones offered hotspot access at home through your internet connection without using your plan minutes for only $10! We were thrilled.

We get the new phones, everything seemed great. We could call anywhere from our home via the hotspot where previously we had no signal. Then the problems started. My wife would run out to run some errands, I would call her and get an error “The phone number you have dialed is not in service”. Happened every single time.

So we’ve had the phones for maybe a week, we called T-Mobile. We were on the phone with them for at least an hour before they decided they needed to send it to a higher level engineer. Four or five days go by and we haven’t heard anything. We called again and said we just wanted to return the phones while we are in our return window. The representative assured us on the phone that as long as we are troubleshooting with T-Mobile, we will be able to return the phones if they do not come up with a resolution. That sounded fine… we will give them a chance to fix the issue. Once again, she said she was escalating it to higher support and they would call back within a week. We waited two weeks, heard nothing. We called back again. This time, they were sending someone out in our area to check the towers, they will call back in a week…

Months later, after going through this every other week with T-Mobile, we told them since they cannot fix the issue and it has been months, we would like to return our phones. That conversation went like this, almost verbatim.

Me: “We have had this issue since we first got these phones and would like to return them.”

T-Mobile: “I’m sorry, you are out of your 15 day window to return the phones.”

Me: “The representative we first talked to months ago said if we would troubleshoot the issue with you and you cannot come up with a resolution, we could return the phones later.”

T-Mobile: “You only have 15 days to return the phone. You should not have listened to us.”

Are you serious? This pissed me off so badly I was done with T-Mobile. She transferred me to their “loyalty” department so I could cancel my plan. I explained this entire story to the “loyalty” department person, they couldn’t care less. She told me I would have to pay both contract cancellations ($400). I finally got her to let us only pay one cancellation ($200). Now I was off to transfer my number to a new service which would cancel my service with T-Mobile. I decided to get a new number, so called back in to cancel. Guess what! They cannot offer me the $200 cancellation, I have to pay the full $400! That’s lovely. Hung up on them, called back got someone else, same thing, $400. Hung up on them, called back, got my $200 again.

Meanwhile, my wife and I found the problem with the phones right before we closed our accounts. When someone was on the hotspot router at home and someone was on the edge network away from home, you could not call them. I could switch to edge at home (going outside) and call just fine. Turns out the hotspot is garbage.

This is the worst customer experience I have ever had in my life. I would discourage anyone from choosing T-Mobile.

Jayme

Comments

• Kevin Upchurch on 12.05.2008 at 12:36 PM

• Did you try crying about it? That always helps.

• sam de la garza on 12.05.2008 at 5:00 PM

• yea... I left t-mobile because we didn't have a signal in our local mall. it was frustrating when my wife and I would "seperate" at the mall...and then end up spending an extra two hours because we couldn't reconnect. Sorry no signal. Funny enough though...there's 2 t-mobile stores at the mall and one behind the mall... and yet no service there. FAIL.

  We're now with ATT and love our iphones.

  BTW, I finally convinced tony triguerro to switch to att from t-mobile.

• Ken Robertson on 12.07.2008 at 11:40 AM

• All cell phone companies are garbage. All concepts of customer support are lost on them.

• Derek on 2.07.2009 at 9:25 AM

• I was a AT&T customer and switched to T-Mobile last OCT ('08). Worst thing I could have done. Signals are spotty. I live right across the street from the T-Mobile store where I get full strength signal yet when I walk across the street to my front yard, I get 1 bar or nothing. I think there playing games to increase signal strength in their store. Maybe the store has a repeator? I'm not happy and I've got the support run-a-rounds as well.

  AVOID T-MOBILE AT ALL COSTS....!

• Joan in Las Vegas on 2.15.2009 at 9:01 PM

• I've been with T-Mobile for 4 or 5 years. I reported them to Better Business Bureau and am reporting them to the Attorney General. Last year when I balanced my checkbook my check payment to T-Mobile was processed twice,the first day as an ACH payment, the second day as a check. They actually processed the check. I and my bank have a copy of it. Of course the rude Supervisor insisted that they don't process payments as a check and it wouldn't do any good to send a copy of the processed check. Because the payments only show as an ACH on T-Mobiles records they cannot see the processed check. Even after sending them my bank statement and a copy of the processed check they have done nothing.

• rules for checkers on 4.22.2009 at 5:36 AM

• Please do not sign up for the T-Mobile @home service. The service is not reliable and there are too many technical issues that have not been resolved by T mobile. The Linksys router causes interference with other modems and has to be reconfigured to work properly with most ISP. The customer service staff at T-Mobile is not knowledgeable about their own product and keeps transferring you to another number with no resolution to the problem. I have canceled this service. It has been more trouble than it is worth.

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• john on 5.10.2009 at 4:59 PM

• yea, I think T-Mobile @home service is not reliable and there are too many technical issues that have not been resolved

• dot on 6.02.2009 at 5:01 PM

• Be afraid, be very afraid. I signed up for T-Mobile@Home service in July, 2008. It appeared to work alright w/ some outages until January, 2009 when it was down for minutes, hours, days. When the problem occurs it requires you to reset your router each and every time. It was so bad I had to set up a surge protector under my desk, so I could simply use my foot to turn the router on and off, on and off, on and off…. When I called to complain, t-mobile told me they were not aware of this problem, well to be frank they are liars. There are postings all over the place, including their own forum on how unreliable this service really is.

  They sent me a new router, knowing full well this wouldn’t solve the problem - the problem was I believed them. Why wouldn’t I, I had VOIP for years from other providers with no real problems. Well - same problems. You are on the phone and all of sudden the person on the other end cannot hear you - reset the router. You call them back or they call you and it drops again - reset the router. You do it a few more times - same thing. Like I said it may be minutes but more likely hours and in the end days at a time. It also takes your internet service with it. Linksys forum also has many postings, look up “no blue light”.

  So I call again - told my case was closed - really, no one called to see if it was working. Told you have to start at the lower level customer service all over again. Email CEO, get call from executive response team. Now they are angry, combative, abusive and threatening - yes, threatening to “investigate” my phone calls or how I use my phone - I told them - have at it. Their executive response person Beckett spoke over me continually - actually yelling at me. I told her I did not want any more contact with her - find someone else. Oh - did I mention she thought it was funny I had this kind of phone service. Even though the phone continually disconnected while I was speaking with her - she tried to claim it wasn’t their problem and they still expected me to pay the bill. Anyway, Beckett had the audacity to keep calling me and I told her emphatically not to call. She said she would continue to call - oh, really - had to inform her this was harassment in writing. Then someone else called but the call kept dropping and they didn’t call back.

  Senior tech Kevin calls and told me he had the same issue, but it wasn’t as bad these days - not as bad - are you kidding me! He was supposed to come to me and bring a new router - well he never showed up. Then a letter from t-mobile they are terminating my service and keeping my activation fees, the money for phones and equipment, but we still want you to pay the balance on your bill or we won’t release your number. Keep in mind I paid all along, believing they were honestly attempting to fix the problem - because they said so - like I said - LIARS. In April when the service became unbearable, leaving me without my internet service - I told them I would pay when they fixed the problem - therefore I was disputing my bill. American consumers have to stop being doormats - we have let this happen. Not me - not anymore. I reported them to the FCC, BBB, AG and small claims. An important fact is that you cannot call 911 should you need to when you have no service or it disconnects every minute. Well at least that would get the cops here, since they would figure we were making prank calls to 911. Totally disgraceful company.

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• nathan on 7.17.2009 at 11:45 AM

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• angry mob :) on 7.24.2009 at 4:43 AM

• This article has made my day, it really has, i thought i was the only person having problems, it's just as bad in the UK, although i havn't had that much contact with 'customer services' (or so they like to be called) the service itself is terrible, 3G is slower than 2G most of the time too!

  Heed these words, SAY NO TO T-MOBILE!!! :) xD

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