Don't Believe It

I got talked into trying SpectrumMobile service. The biggest selling point for me was that it piggybacks on Verizon's network, promising the same excellent quality service for about a fourth of the price.

It ain't so.

Spectrum Mobile shipped me two new LG phones, with software that made it fairly easy to transfer info from our old phones to the new ones. Service here in town was not noticeably different.

Then I went on a trip to Florida. Once I passed out of the city, I had, essentially, no service of any kind. I had no phone signal almost the entire way. Occasionally I would have one or two bars, in cities like Houston and New Orleans -- not enough, I learned, to actually make a call. For data, I could get no 4G signal, and usually couldn't even get a 3G signal. Mostly I had no signal whatsoever, though occasionally I'd have a 1G signal. Which is very close to no signal whatsoever.

As I got almost to Tampa I finally had enough of a signal to enable me to use GPS navigation to my hotel ... sort of. At critical moments it would cut out, so I would hear instructions such as "In one mile." That's it, just "In one mile." Not very helpful. (And I still had no phone signal.)

While I was in Tampa I had spotty SMS service. For example, I could send a text from Row M at Raymond James Stadium, but not from Row F. (My seat was in Row F.) I would try to send texts from all over town, but usually got the message "Text not sent; tap message to try again." Sometimes it'd go through on the second try; sometimes it'd go through twice. Usually it didn't go through at all.

The only time the cellphone worked reliably was when I was connected to the wi-fi network at my hotel. That's not acceptable. The fundamental purpose of a cellphone is to have access to help should something bad happen, like if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, or if you're using GPS to get somewhere. If there's a wireless network available, there's probably someone with a working telephone within a hundred yards.

I tried calling Spectrum Mobile while in Tampa, to see if there was something they could do about the pisspoor quality of service. I couldn't get a signal for long enough to get past the first item on their call menu. And by then I had decided that this was not a service I wished to continue with. It was worse than when I had T-Mobile, years ago.

So when I got back home I called Spectrum to tell them I wanted to discontinue the service and send the phone back. They tried to tell me there was a $35 per-phone restocking fee, but I told them I wasn't going to pay that because I'd been told when I signed up for the service that there was a 30-day risk-free trial period, and that if I didn't like it all I had to do was send the phones back. When I threatened to find myself a new internet-and-cable provider, the woman on the phone finally told me I could take the phones to the local Spectrum store.

I looked the Spectrum store location up on the Internet. It's just off the Interstate, about 6 miles from my house. So this morning I went there to return the phones. The guy there told me that he couldn't take the phones, because that location was a Spectrum Cable store and they don't handle the mobile side of the business. He played on his computer for a while and then told me that I could take the phones to Fed-Ex and they would ship them back to the location they need to get to. "They'll be able to print the label there," he said, apparently reading it off his computer screen.

So I went to Fed-Ex. They couldn't print a label because they didn't know where the phones were supposed to go.  So: back to the Spectrum store to find out where the Spectrum Mobile store was. Then I went there and they insisted they couldn't take the phones back because they had been shipped to me, and not bought in the store. (Is this crazy?) But they couldn't tell me where to ship them. So I started making a loud fuss about wanting to get rid of these phones and get rid of their crappy cellphone service, and they swung into action. A guy comes out from the back and says he will get me the address of where to send the phones. He got on the phone and called the same people I'd been on the phone with for an hour the previous evening, and got put on hold. While he was on hold, though, the Fed-Ex guy came in with some boxes that had the address on them, so he copied the address down. Upshot is, I ended up paying about $12 to send those damn phones back. Good riddance.

I understand that Spectrum Mobile is presently available only to Spectrum cable customers. I've been pretty happy with my cable service, but now I'm having second thoughts about that, too. If their new mobile business represents the kind of service I can expect going forward, I'd better start looking at alternatives.

Stooping to Murder

If Donald Trump pulls U.S. troops out of Syria so that troops of our ally Turkey can march in unobstructed and slaughter the fighters of our Kurdish allies, it will be the greatest betrayal perpetrated by the United States in its history: a betrayal not only of the Kurdish fighters who have done so much of our dirty work in both Syria and Iraq, but of our most cherished beliefs about ourselves. We will never live down the deserved shame that we will earn.