time to jump ship

[zflash4000]

Will be paying off my free (not really free) phone and moving to another company at $30 a month.  Had enough.

[TinyDonkey]

Sorry the experience didn't live up to your expectations, Z.

In 1980, the average monthly phone line access fee was about $9.85, people rented their landline phone like they do routers from cable companies now for $1.50 to $5 per month equipment fee.  So, in 1980, we were between $11.35 and $14.85 per month before making any calls.  Calls were billed per minute then with long distance being more expensive.  Let's only consider long distance at an average cost of $0.40 per minute and only 100 minutes of talk time to Grandma per month for $40.  We're now at, in 1980 dollars, an average monthly phone bill of $51.35 to $54.35 before any local calls and before any taxes, fees, or special add on services.  Now, onto inflation. 

The historic average rate of inflation is 3.6% annually, which means the cost of things doubles every twenty years.  Inflation adjusted, the average 1980 phone bill for merely talking to Grandma in Florida for 25 minutes per week would be the equivalent of $205.40 to $217.40 in 2020 Dollars. 

Gonna pay $30 monthly?  Watcha gonna get for that?  Well, luckily, you'll probably still be making calls on Verizon network and Verizon equipment, but you'll be doing it with a provider that merely rents that radio signal from the Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile networks.  When the providers who actually own the equipment install that equipment and the servers needed to run that equipment, through software, they program it to tell the radio antenna which type of customer is the top priority.  The short story is simply that Verizon customers who pay the most monthly get top priority any time they're connected to a Verizon antenna.  Whoever owns the antenna will literally program that antenna to first drop the user who represents the lowest revenue first before anyone else during times of peak network usage or congestion in heavily populated areas.

The moral of the story is:  phone service has never provided more value and usefulness to consumers than it does now and phone service has never been cheaper than it is now.  Check the Federal Trade Commission inflation reports, compared to all other goods phone service is one of the fees l few areas of the economy where the cost of the good/service has gone down compared to everything else the last forty years.  Pay $30 monthly?  Feel free, but then you'll be the guy who has a heart attack on the way to his lake house and dies on the side of the road when his dollar store phone fails to get signal.

[TinyDonkey]

Also, when you pay off that phone, it's the phone manufacturer who profits, not the carrier. 

Check the net profit margins of the companies.  Apple makes WAY more money than carriers.  Nobody profits off phones except the manufacturers who produce them.  That's why carriers require device payment plans when you buy phones from them, because they only earn a profit if you pay for the phone service for 36 months (do the math, $40 monthly service x 36 months is $1440 or roughly the cost of a high end phone).

[SynthpopAddict]

It's possible the OP joined on a "free phone" deal, but they had poor or no signal strength with Verizon, which would be extraordinarily frustrating since you also have to get Unlimited Ultimate in order to qualify for a free phone.  In which case, I'd totally understand them wanting to leave now.  However, if it's more the price point of the top level plan being problematic, I completely agree with the statements that budget carriers are piggybacking off one or more of the "Big 3", so the actual operators of the networks will deprioritize budget carrier customers all the way to the bottom of the network barrel.  I came from a budget carrier myself and will personally attest that my phone would go into SOS mode at least once a month or else be glitched out some other way (randomly would have problems with calls/texts even when phone wasn't in SOS).  And this budget carrier was using Verizon!  My problems went away after I ported directly to Verizon.

Would recommend being a prepaid customer with one of the big carriers for a service plan which doesn't cost a fortune instead of the 3rd party discount carriers.  You will still be deprioritized to the postpaid customers, but will get better priority on the towers over the 3rd party guys.  The only budget carrier who consistently gets good ratings is the one named for a type of candy.  They use T-Mobile, and T-Mobile must've gotten tired of whatever arrangement "Candy Carrier" had with them, because I'm pretty sure they bought "Candy Carrier" outright sometime last year, so who knows what's going to happen with the service there?

[vzw_customer_support]

Hello, zflash4000. Help is here as we don't want to see you leave us. Please tell me more. What happened to make you feel this way? 

-Natasha