Cell Phones (a continuing saga)

November 24th, 2009

So as my regular readers know I have been grappling with how to lower my cell phone costs (without getting rid of them completely). About a month ago my wife took the bold first step of going from a Bell “Contract” (which had expired) over to a Telus “pay per use” phone.

This was done as an experiment to see how things might work, and we found out that:

To set up the new phone is relatively painless, but know which phone you would like first and make sure you use the on line system management capabilities to track your account.
Number Portability is easy to use, but has a few pitfalls in it. If you are going to port a number, make sure you bring a Customer ID or your old phone bill to the NEW carrier (to make this work faster).

My wife had her new phone working with her old phone number within an hour or two and she was very happy with her new phone (she loathed her old phone) and has been happily texting and using her new set up.

This all transpired about 2 weeks ago.

A few days ago the Bell bill showed up and that is when I lost 66 minutes of my life and about $36 as well.

I checked the Bell Wireless bill on line and was confused to see the total on the bill was about as much as it normally was, given my wife and I were “twinned” on a single plan, however, given my wife’s phone number no longer was running on Bell I suddenly needed to read much closer.

So two major things looked like gouging wrong on my bill:

My wife’s old phone number was still being billed by Bell, even though it was connected to the Telus network
My phone (which was still connected to the Bell network) was running a different “service package” and I had been billed for $22 worth of texting charges

I was confident that if I called the Bell 1-800 number I would get satisfaction and would get these charges reversed, however I was only 1/2 correct.

Tomorrow: How hard could it be to right such obvious wrongs? Oh naive reader, you just wait.

Back to the Carnivals

My post about Risk has been picked up by Carnival of Money Stories , and the The Carnival of Personal Finance (Thanksgiving Edition) go on over and read some of the other interesting posts there as well.