Qwest Bait-and-Switch
When I was first tempted to buy Qwest DSL, the advertised price was $25 for 5 mbps with MSN Premium!! After I talked to the salespeople, I discovered that since I had a Mac, MSN Premium would not work for me. So they gave me plain qwest.net for the low, low price of $37. You see, the $25 price was the promotional price, and they didn't lower all their prices to go with it, just that one. The fact that I was getting less, but paying more, seemed like nothing but a humorous antecdote to the salespeople.
I got my bill Saturday. $48: $38 for the DSL and $10 for the ISP. Plus an additional $12 of MSN Premium charges for April, when the DSL wasn't even hooked up yet. The MSN Premium charges were easy enough to cancel. The mysterious $11 per month, though, was impossible to erase. "I'm sorry," she said, "but whoever quoted you the $37 for combined DSL and qwest.net was just wrong." Yeah, they always are, aren't they? If it were a small company, you'd be able to sue them for fraud, but Qwest is a mega-corporation, and thus they have plausible deniability.
I threatened to cancel my Qwest account completely, and her attitude was, "Just pay this month and goodbye!" But is Comcast really any cheaper? And I'd have to run a cable all the way around my living room to get to my computer from the tv plug.
To top it off, these prices are only guaranteed for twelve months. Then it will jump up to $54, if not more.
2 comments:
The people at Qwest have no accountability. The nice-but-useless guy I spoke with this morning informed me that the 1-800 number gets routed to whichever of the few dozen call centers has the most clear lines. So there is absolutely no way to track down the woman who sold me the Brooklyn Bridge, as it were.
I mentioned this setup to the man this morning, that they could offer anything they wanted and the next person could just deny it, and he said, "Yep."
He didn't care a whelk about the FCC. And why would he? He's just a lowly employee. He'll probably be working somewhere else in a month. And the big bosses wouldn't care since they have more money than I do.
Hey, here's one for ya. My boss has Cingular cell & wireless service. His wife went to Europe & made all her reservations using the laptop, thinking that would be cheaper than using her cell phone. Just got the bill - $7,427 for data transfer roaming charges for one month . . . talk about misrepresentation!!
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