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In what might be our favorite post of the year, Eyeless Writer has conducted an experiment with Verizon Wireless. He called them 56 times, asking two questions each time. 1) What is the data overage rates for the basic 10MB data package for $29.99, and 2) If you get the Core Choice 450 minutes package with unlimited data, what is the data roaming rate in Canada?And, well, it wouldn’t have been an interesting post if all 56 reps answered it accurately. It is a great post, though, because of the highly varied answers he did receive.

I was prepared to receive a few wrong answers. I thought it was likely I’d be quoted a few of the rates as cents per kilobyte when the operator really meant dollars per kilobyte. What I didn’t expect was how many wrong answers I’d get. While many operators did mistakenly quote cents instead of dollars, a large portion of the mistakes were simply wrong, regardless of where the decimal fell. This means that even if Verizon has since addressed the cents/dollars issue, that by itself wouldn’t be enough.

Instead of summarizing the results, we’ll quote them:

* 1. Only 2% of the operators (1 person) answered both questions correctly.

* 2. 52% failed to answer even one of the two questions correctly.

* 3. 5% transfered me because they didn’t know an answer.

* 4. 93% quoted an incorrect rate.

* 5. Though the questions only had two correct answers (1 for each question), I received 22 unique responses.

* 6. The most common response was not the correct rate.

* 7. 50% of the incorrect responses under-quoted Verizon’s actual rate by 100x or more.

* 8. Nearly all the operators asked if I’d like to sign up for a contract after quoting a rate.

At the end of the 56 calls, I had no real idea what the correct rates actually were. To find that out, I had to call Verizon’s PR and ask them for a “printable rate” for an article I was working on.

The actual answers are .2 cents per KB for data overages, and .5 cents per KB for roaming data in Canada.

The message is clear: make sure you know the actual rates yourself. Because Verizon isn’t going to throw you a bone.

[Eyeless Writer] via [Consumerist]

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