“Cellphone companies do not make it easy to break two-year contracts. But it can be done through shrewd negotiating or by turning to the innovators on the Internet who match contract sellers with people who want to assume the contract,” Damon Darlin reports for The New York Times.
Darlin reports, “Early termination fees are intended to compensate phone companies for the discount they gave on the phone upfront. Most mobile phone companies charge the full fee no matter when the contract is scheduled to expire. Verizon Wireless recently decided to prorate the fee, and some of the other companies do that in certain cities.”
Darlin reports, “The companies will waive the early termination fee if you die. Pretending to be dead, however, does not work well as a way to break a contract. Sprint Nextel, Verizon and Cingular, for example, may ask for a death certificate. T-Mobile says it does not. ‘They want to take people at their word,’ said Graham Crow, a spokesman for the company.”
MacDailyNews Take: We hereby pre-express our sympathies to all soon-to-be-dead T-Mobile customers. Some advice: use it or lose it: T-Mobile will probably change their policy quickly as iPhone switchers begin to drop like flies.
Darlin continues, “Joining the military can sometimes work to break a contract if you are going to be stationed overseas… Next to death, moving to a place where your phone company does not have service may not seem so draconian… There is an intriguing escape clause in contracts with phone companies that offer ‘roaming’ services, though it is intended to give the carrier a way out…. Roam too much and your phone company starts losing money. Find a place where your phone goes into roaming mode and make at least half your calls from there.”
“A more practical approach has been bandied about on a number of blogs since October, when many carriers raised the price of text messaging. They pointed out a clause in contracts that says if changes adversely affect your rates or service, the consumer has the right to end the contract early without paying a penalty,” Darlin writes.
More info and ideas in the full article here.
Good luck!
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Does anyone else find the iPod accessories picture next to the article strange? The photo usually has a tie-in to the article.
By some stroke of fate, my Verizon contract expires on June 19th, 2007. 😀
my cingular service was terminated about three months before the contract expiration date without penalty.
at six months it would have been $60. i won’t be returning; my home is in a no reception area.
Actually, the dying part was a suggestion by Monkeyboy Ballmer. Sorry Mac users, Microsoft officially denies any knowledge of such a plan, and if such a plan were in existence, we would of course deny it.
My Nextel contract expires in April. 😀
Hi, im from aust
and im travelling to the u.s. at the end of the year
im trying to find out if i can buy an iphone outright and bring it back to aust and put another simcard into it?