Getting Out of a Wireless Contract

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So I got $275 in gift cards to the Apple store for Christmas and I went today looking to buy the new iphone 5. Seeing that the price without contract online was $649 and with my early upgrade from AT&T of $200, I was expecting to pay about $174 before taxes for a new phone. Nope. Come to find out, if I use my upgrade at the apple store, they give me the AT&T price for the phone of $849, and my early upgrade "Discount" of $200, which makes the phone still, $649, which after my gift cards would still be $374 before taxes.

What Im planning on doing now is cancelling my contract from AT&T because Im not happy with them anymore (after being with them for 13 years). I dont have a signal in a lot of places where friends with Verizon have service, and they throttle my data speeds if I go over a certain usage a month.

If I cancel my contract and switch to Verizon, it will cost me $205 to cancel my contract, and $104 for the phone with my $275 gift cards, bringing the total to $324, which is cheaper than staying with AT&T.

My question is, can I get out of my contract without having to pay the $205 cancellation fee?
 

Big Phoenix

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Why switch to Verizon when they have the worst data plans of all the major carriers.
 

Pancreas

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I remember seeing a video where some guy went into great detail about cancelling his Verizon contract on a technicality that just about anyone could claim. Something to do with a variable federal fee and how it violated the clause that required all increases in monthly fee's to be announced to the client in advance or something like that.

There seem to be a bunch of short articles on the subject. But really, if you can show that you have had interruption of service or unauthorized changes in fees, those tend to be the strongest cases to make in order to void a phone contract. I think no matter what though, it's going to take a lot of haggling and pushing the issue, politely, before they decide to budge.

Other suggestions were:

-To reduce your contract to the bare minimum, no text or data, smallest number of minutes... whatever and see what that costs per month. Compare that to your early termination fee and see if it's cheaper to run it out that way.

-Trade your contract with someone else using the service you want, or find someone willing to take over your contract.

-Or just die, that will end pretty much any contract.
 
My contract doesnt end till Dec 2013, so even if my bill were $20 a month, it wouldnt be worth leaving it going.

I can get 3-4Gb a month data plans with Verizon, and Ive never been over 3GB ever using my phone.
 

GuardianX

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So I got $275 in gift cards to the Apple store for Christmas and I went today looking to buy the new iphone 5. Seeing that the price without contract online was $649 and with my early upgrade from AT&T of $200, I was expecting to pay about $174 before taxes for a new phone. Nope. Come to find out, if I use my upgrade at the apple store, they give me the AT&T price for the phone of $849, and my early upgrade "Discount" of $200, which makes the phone still, $649, which after my gift cards would still be $374 before taxes.

What Im planning on doing now is cancelling my contract from AT&T because Im not happy with them anymore (after being with them for 13 years). I dont have a signal in a lot of places where friends with Verizon have service, and they throttle my data speeds if I go over a certain usage a month.

If I cancel my contract and switch to Verizon, it will cost me $205 to cancel my contract, and $104 for the phone with my $275 gift cards, bringing the total to $324, which is cheaper than staying with AT&T.

My question is, can I get out of my contract without having to pay the $205 cancellation fee?
Trying right now to get out of a contract with AT&T myself.

Basically I was told a ton of misinformation which will likely lead to the ETF getting waived.

DEC 10th -- Port my number to T-Mobile to test their service without contract.

DEC 13th -- Contact AT&T and ask them if there are any Future bills I will be responsible for, they say no.

DEC 25th -- Receive an automated email from AT&T saying my bill is ready, Bill is for a $289 ETF.

DEC 28th -- Call AT&T and tell them they can either waive my ETF with them ($289) or pay for my ETF with T-Mobile ($600) and give me the same service at the same fees they offer.

They said they will have a resolution by Jan 2nd...
 

thefaceless

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I remember someone saying something about telling them you'll be moving to a place that doesn't get any reception, and then you can cancel no problem.
 

Falstaff

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I remember someone saying something about telling them you'll be moving to a place that doesn't get any reception, and then you can cancel no problem.
You'll probably need to prove it to them for this to count. They will most likely ask for your new address and check their own coverage maps.

A couple years ago, we were getting terrible service where we lived... basically no signal in our apartment and a terrible signal even outside. Tried to get out of contract and tried to get some sort of discount but they denied it claiming that they were installing three new towers near us that would eventually fix the problem in the next three to six months.

Best offer they gave us was selling us some signal booster for our apartment at a discount.
 

ronne

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You didn't ride them hard enough then. I got Verizon to terminate my contract due to service issues because I wouldn't accept their shitty signal booster. They tried the same line of "we're fixing the problems in X amount of weeks/months", but you just have to keep badgering them.
 

Falstaff

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Definitely press them on it. I rolled over pretty easily so go with Ronne's advice over mine.
 

Joeboo

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There is no good carrier out of the major ones(AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, TMobile). All of them suck horribly in one way or another, so don't really ever worry if you're getting the best service possible or the best plan, because you're not. No matter who you choose you're going to end up hating them at some point. Fucking cell companies. Just when you think that nothing can be worse than dealing with cable companies, cell companies come along...

It's like a venn diagram, take good coverage, fast data, no throttling/limits, and good pricing and choose 2 of those if you are lucky. You'll never get 3 from any 1 carrier, and all four would be dreaming.
 

Big Phoenix

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Tmobile's $30 "unlimited" data/text and 150 minutes is probably the best package in the US atm. The only nice thing I can say about tmobile is that they have free wifi calling.
 

Big Phoenix

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Yeah $30. Nice thing like I said is free wifi calling that goes with it so if you ever do need to make a lot of calls, theyre free so long as youre on wifi. Only catch to wifi calling is you have to use a stock tmobile device, as last time I checked no custom roms have working wifi calling.