Hello T-Mobile, Goodbye Verizon | Silicon Valley Living

We’ve been with Verizon Wireless for over 14 years, we liked the quality of service and signals. We are very extremely frugal when it comes to monthly expense, especially living in Silicon Valley, CA when everything is so expensive.

***We had a family plan with Verizon, with discount from our company, we had 700 minutes, 4 lines share, no text and no data for $89 per month since “forever”.

***T-Mobile family plan: $100 for 4 lines, unlimited text, unlimited calls, unlimited data, with company discount, $96 per month. It does sound like a no-brainer comparison there. We jumped.

We’re not low tech people, but we don’t use data much, when we go to work, we have internet (for work and email already), we go home, we have internet for personal stuff. We don’t stay on the street to surf the internet much, that’s why we never needed smart phones. We do think texting is a good feature, if we turned on texting with Verizon, it will push the bill to $120 per month.

We’re not Apple product die-hard people, but we do like Apple products, our kids have ipod touches and I do use Mac OSX on my laptops. Apple produce quality products, no doubt, but getting these iPhones 6’s do cost a lot $750 each for 64 GB. Yes, T-Mobile will finance for free of interest for 2 years which comes out ~ $28 each month with $100 up front + tax cost, now, the tax here in CA is about 9%, no chump change either.

So, it’s time for me to research to find the best phones for the money from T-Mobile. After a few nights of reading specs and reviews, we decided 4 – LG Optimus F6 certified smart phones for our family @ $79 each. Why LG Optimus F6 and not the new L90? The specs of F6 is much better than the newer one. The main features of the F6 are 4G-LTE capable – NFC – the only problem with the F6 is that it only has 4GB of internal memory and actually only 1.27 GB for user to use. We got 32 GB micro SD cards for storing pictures and music for $13 each. If we want to install more apps, we need to ROOT the phones which will void all warranty, but that’s the chance we have to take if we want an inexpensive phones.

[title]Lesson Learned When Moving From One Service Provider To Another[/title][body]

We’ve had the same phone numbers for 14 years and we don’t want to change them. To move from Verizon to T-Mobile, we need T-Mobile to port the phone number from Verizon to T-Mobile. We did the order online, the phones take 4-5 days to ship to us. It was also over the weekend, more days. T-Mobile is very efficient, they ported the number the next day which all our Verizon phones are inactive while our new phones are in transit – No phones for 4-5 days, no way, we had to call Verizon to port the phones back, they’re nice enough not to charge us for re-activation fee because they really want us to come back if T-Mobile doesn’t work out, it does cost us some extra money, but not much.

So, don’t port any numbers until you received the new phones, then call the service number and ask them to port when you have the phones in hands and working. T-Mobile customer service is extremely efficient and pleasant, very well trained IMO. Verizon customer service has always been good too, especially when “she” called T-Mobile to port our numbers back, very patient and pleasant.

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[title1]Technical Difficulty and Customer Service at a T-Mobile Retailer[/title1][body1]

With Verizon, we never had any SIM or anything like that, the phones would work when we sent the phones to our 84 year old father and 70+ Aunt in Southern CA. This time, the phone didn’t work, the SIM needs to be reprogrammed, update, talking on the phone with customer service people (which are very professional and GOOD), they wanted my father and my Aunt to read the a long SIM card number printed small on the cards or the cases, which are very hard for them. So, I asked my Father and my Aunt to take the phones to the local T-Mobile places.

One of the T-Mobile retailers would refuse to help, due to “You didn’t sign contract and bought phones with us” and just let my 84 year old father there. Luckily, the phone started to work – may be it was Operator error + phones intermittent error.

My Aunt’s phone would call and ring but can’t hear the other side or vice versa. Sometimes the phone would pop up “SIM needs to be updated”. I called the 611 again, very nice customer service would try to solve the problems online, but with older people who never used a smart phone before, it was practically impossible. So, my Aunt would take the phone to a different T-Mobile store, this time, I asked her to choose the corporate ones, but if you Google, they won’t say which ones are real and which ones are NOT. Anyhow, she found a REAL one, and they did help very nicely, she got the phone working.

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Are we glad that we’d moved from Verizon to T-Mobile? It’s only been less than a week, we can’t tell yet, but one thing I know for sure is that the signal from T-Mobile is more inferior than of Verizon – why do I know this? Yesterday, I was talking to my father, walking into Kohl store and the signal dropped, which never happened with Verizon, as soon as I walked to the door, the signal was back. I’ll test again, since T-Mobile has this WIFI calling, the dropped call may due to the switching between Wifi calling to free internet (which is poor). Another lesson learned with T-Mobile Wifi calling, TURN IT OFF, because if you have poor wifi like U-verse or other DSL, it’s better to use 3-4G calling from T-Mobile. Just turn the wifi calling feature off, but leave the wifi connected so you can save the 1GB 4G-LTE connections.

I hope T-Mobile would have their corporate stores (who actually care to help customers to keep the business) marked with Google or Bing or Yahoo that “CORPORATE” and NOT ” don’t care authorized dealer stores” so people who sign up and bought phones online would go to the right place for after sale services – Unless, the company doesn’t really care about after sales customer service.

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