Bloody Cell Phone Companies

July 1st, 2009 Filed under: Life, Rants | Tags: cell phone, telecom, vodafone

I hate cell phone companies. If I could, I would not have a cell phone at all. But I don’t have a land line number, so a cell phone is pretty much a must.

In New Zealand there are two major cell phone companies; Telecom and Vodafone. I personally use Vodafone because they have cell phones that use sim cards unlike Telecom which allows me to use the same phone I use in Taiwan, Canada etc.

Both companies offer similar plans and charges for their users, for instance they both have a best mate number which you can choose which allows you to call one number as much as you want for a month for $6, and 2000 text plan where you can send up to 2000 text messages for $10 a month. The difference is that both companies only allow you to call and text other phones on their network for the special plan, otherwise you have to pay normal charges.

As you can imagine this means that you usually choose a company based on what all your family and friends use. For instance most of my friends are on Vodafone, so I text them whenever I want, but the few friends that I do have that are on Telecom I don’t usually text because it costs me $0.20 per text on top of my $10 2000 text plan.

Up until recently it was pretty easy to tell who was on which network because all Vodafone numbers began with 021 and all Telecom numbers began with 027. I say up until recently because they have started to allow users to keep their numbers while switching networks now.

This resulted in me wasting a bunch of money, as one of my friends changed to Telecom without telling me. I continued to text them thinking it wasn’t costing me anything all the while I was slowly but surely spending a lot of extra money. Of course I didn’t find out until weeks later when I ran out of money on my phone, much to my surprise.

That is just another reason why I hate cell phone companies. Bastards.

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