We have been early customers of T-Mobile’s Hotspot at Home service. I still think that it is revolutionary, and surprised that a competitor has not hopped on the band wagon. I have heard rumors that Sprint was introducing a similar, but less versatile, service. I have not found proof on the Sprint or credible sites.
As a follow up to other’s cell phone horror stories and my T-Mobile service experience, we have had one small problem with T-Mobile. Last month, we noticed that we were quickly using our anytime minutes and we did in fact go over five dollars. The strange thing was that no matter how we altered our phone usage we could not stop the hemmorage of minutes. Being a parent-I blamed the kids first. They swore they were not burning minutes. I began to suspect a problem with T-Mobile’s billing system.
This month, I waited one week into the month so that we would have a variety of usage but not an overwhelming amount of data. Score one for T-Mobile that they allow customers to download current minute usage to Excel or similar spreadsheet software. I was ultimately able to manipulate the numbers to show T-Mobile that a problem existed. I was never able to pin down the problem, but the customer service representative was able to do so in a nearly one-hour telephone call. She discovered that T-Mobile was not crediting two users HotSpot at Home usage correctly. The usage was being subtracted from our anytime minutes.
The end of the story is that they refunded the overage last month, corrected this month’s usage, and I apologized to the kids.
Epilogue: Do not ever pay T-Mobile late. I think that it would be cheaper to skip the mortgage for a week or two. The late fee for T-Mobile is $20 per line. That is right. Four lines = $80 late fee.