Yet one more reason why I will never use Verizon...
I have had a long-time beef with Verizon (for reasons I won't go into here) and here is yet one more story that gives me reason not to ever even consider the thought of using them. For those of you who have ever been to some kind of Photoshop conference (especially the NAPP ones), you most certainly probably know who Ben Willmore is. Over the past year, Ben had decided to sell his home and live aboard a motor-home full-time. Ben has been blogging his travels and experiences throughout the entire process and it's been fun to watch where he is going and what he's doing. I can't help but feel green with envy at him being able to do something so cool! :-)
In any case, in these days we all need to be connected and Ben is no exception. Ben decided to get his broadband fix by using Verizon's EVDO broadband service. So apparently "unlimited" access is not really "unlimited" in today's corporate contracts or advertising. This is actually not unusual, but it doesn't make it right. Corporate America is fast and furious to take your money and hold you to ridiculous contracts when it is in their favor, but lord help you if you try to actually use the service you are paying for in any kind of "unlimited" capacity.
"I've been using a Verizon EVDO card since I started living on the bus. It seems that they don't like people who actually need to use the net for their daily business life. I just received notice that they will cut off service for my card starting on 9/6/2006 because I used 10 Gigabytes of bandwidth over the last 30 days. I guess they have no idea that some people actually have to upload/download high resolution photography and do business on the net. I guess getting the satellite dish has become a major priority right now."
This is just WRONG. It's time that the public began to hold these corporations to their advertising. If you don't really mean UNLIMITED, then dammit, DO NOT say it is and then cry wolf when someone attempts to actually use it for business. If you are going to cut someone off, at least have the common courtesy to give them a warning before just canceling their contract. So the funny thing is that I am sure there are many of you out there that signed up for that EVDO service with "unlimited" data, yet for some reason need to or want to cancel, but are afraid to get hit with the penalties for doing so. Why not give Verizon a taste of their own medicine and start jamming that pipe? ;-) Now I am not advocating violating the terms of your service agreement, but surely they can't prevent you from say...uploading content via FTP to your server, or some other creative use of mega-sized files that need to be sent somewhere right? Let Verizon cancel you and you just got out of your contract. They like games? Just play them right back people.
You can check out the rest of the story on Ben's site and while you are at it, go ahead and subscribe to his feed! Let him know bisonium.com sent ya and you support him in the fight for what's right.
Technorati Tags: Clueless, EVDO, Mobility, Peripherals, Stupidity, Verizon, Wireless
