It’s Friday, so it’s consumer issue time!

It seems that every Friday we stumble across a cell phone story over at Consumerist. This week, it’s the story of a wronged T-Mobile customer. After signed up for the service, she was met with immediate problems. To be specific, she couldn’t receive calls and text messages sometimes didn’t go through. So basically she had huge alleys of communications cut of…yet was still paying for this lack of service. She spent time with customer service, who chalked it up to “network difficulties in New York City.” We’re familiar with those difficulties. We have a couple of friends in the city with T-Mobile, and more than once they’ve wanted to chuck their phones against the wall.

After three months of this, the customer asked to be let out of her contract, since T-Mobile had not lived up to their end. She was of course denied, and offered $5 per month as compensation. Wow. What a sweet, loving gesture, T-Mobile.

The overall problem, though, is in the area. T-Mobile simply doesn’t have a strong signal in the Northeast. Yet they continue to offer service in the area, and to our knowledge there are no totally satisfied customers in that region.

Yes, we know we tend to lash out against the big telecoms. But we think this one is warranted. If you can’t provide acceptable service in an area, pull out. Don’t go on bamboozling your customers and not living up to your end of the deal. Contracts work two ways, after all.

We further empathize with this woman because she uses the line for business. We can’t imagine how much business she lost because of T-Mobile. However, by contract she can’t sue T-Mobile for business losses. Unless that language is also deemed “unenforceable.”

[Consumerist]

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