Can I upgrade early via a third party?

[StealthCatFood]

Greetings,

I have exhausted 3 hours of my life and a decent chunk of my sanity battling Verizon this morning.  I purchased this plan in September of 2012. I signed up for it at Best Buy and the guy who was processing everything mentioned I had an early upgrade option after a year. I was going to try to upgrade around Christmas last year but I didn't see any phones I wanted that would justify replacing my S3 so with the S5 coming out I thought now was a good time. Verizon's site says I am not eligible until 9/4/14 which I immediately thought was an error so I fire up live chat and the person says it might be an error and to contact customer care which I did.  The person I spoke to just said that was the upgrade date without further explanation even after I told her what the prior person said.  This went back and forth and at one time in Chat the person claimed to have found the error and that they had reset my upgrade time when I changed numbers(moved from Indiana to Reno). She ensured me she would document it in the notes and that customer care would take care of it.  When I called them I got the same(seemingly scripted) response.

I have to admit I had grown severely frustrated at the lack proper information and more importantly, the lack of cross communication within Verizon's departments.  I would like to apologize profusely for my short attitude but seriously what is going on here? Was the Best Buy employee just wrong, or is that early upgrade only available through them? When I purchased this plan I had been a Verizon customer for at least 6 years and I decided to try Sprint since a friend of mine had it and always talked up the unlimited data. When I discovered Sprint was complete and utter rubbish in every aspect I decided to opt out since Radio Shack gave me a month risk free trial and go back to Verizon.  Was he offering me this early upgrade as a gimme to get me back into Verizon?

Not once did any Verizon employee pitch the Edge program to me.  When I was looking through threads I saw a bit about it but still had questions I wanted addressed to this particular situation.  Can I opt into the edge program at this point? And from what I understand I would pay monthly for the phone but also get(in my case) a 10 dollar discount on my plan for participating, making that payment essentially 10 dollars less than it indicates.

Sorry for the tremendous amount of text and once again my apologies to the Verizon support staff for being "one of those people"  I have worked a ton in IT and I should really know better.

Thanks

[vzw_customer_support · Accepted solution]

StealthCatFood, your time is too valuable to us to waiste another second. We apologize for any inconvenience this miscommunication of information may have caused you. You are eligible to take advantage of promtional pricing on a new device every 24 months. However, you may be eligible for the Edge Program. Here's more details about this option http://vz.to/1jnPN9W

LasinaH_VZW
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[StealthCatFood]

I think I am eligible, did not see the open enrollment for phones on and before 11/13 on the main page.  Will give this a shot, I appreciate your timely and helpful response.

Take Care

[sprmankalel]

So the early upgrade option was discontinued by Verizon in January of 2011, I believe. It used to be that on a qualifying plan you were eligible to upgrade somewhere after 13 months. Then it was just 20 months which was changed to strictly 2 years. When it was changed to 2 years, anyone whose upgrade date fell on September 1, 2013 and after was extended by that 4 months. So your early upgrade would have been May of 2014 but has been changed by Verizon to reflect 2 years from the date you signed a contract. They can get away with that because the upgrade policy was never written in the contract. Hope this is a little more information than you got from calling in.

Like it was suggested, it is worth seeing if you are eligible to take advantage of the Edge program.