I spent over an hour arguing with people from Verizon about a charge on my bill for my EVDO card.

They charged me another 200 dollars for “minutes” used.  Clearly this is a mistake, as I don’t use the chip embedded in my laptop like others use a cell phone.  It’s impossible actually, seeing as how you hold a mobile phone up to your face and my device is embedded in my laptop :).

At first, they spent 20 minutes telling me that the extra charge was for VOIP calls.  This is a directly quote from the CSR: “For example, you can use Yahoo instant messenger to make VOIP calls where you talking to someone through your computer.”

I continued to argue that they don’t charge for VOIP traffic any differently than normal traffic.

3 times she told me that, yes, in fact they did, and it’s right there in my contract.  I kept asking her to show me where that was in my contract, and of course there was nothing about it.

In fact, Verizon even advertises VOIP as on of the uses of getting an EVDO card and data plan.

Anyway… so eventually they changed their tune and started saying that it was because I was using their Quick2Net network.  I tried to get them to understand that making VOIP calls, and connecting to a different data network are nothing alike, but they continued to act as if they were 1 in the same.

After 45 minutes or so we were no longer arguing about Skype usage and were fully on the topic of the Quick2Net network.  The CSR couldn’t even explain to me WHAT the Quick2Net network was, or HOW I could even connect to this network, IF I WANTED TO!

They had 2 times when they claimed I connected to the Quick2Net network for an extended period.  Both of these times conflicted with my local VZAccessManager logs of when I was connected to the BroadbandAccess Rev-A network, but the CSR didn’t seem to care about the fact that my own logs conflicted with what they were trying to bill me for.

While I was on hold I did some research and found that the Quick2Net network is the ooooooooold data network that Verizon has.  It’s speed is 14.4k, or about 100 times slower than the connection I already pay for.

In fact, when I found this screen shot, I remembered Quick2Net:

This was probably about 5 years ago when this option was available.  As you can see, you used to be able to click on Quick2Net (and it used to be free), but I haven’t had that option available to me for years.

Finally, the CSR set me to her supervisor, who agreed to refund my charge, and setup my account so that I wouldn’t connect to Quick2Net again.

But, not because I never really connected to quick to net, or because it was a billing error on their part, or because if I DID connect, it was through a fault of their software/network/switches.  No, they agreed because I wouldn’t have “benefited” from the Quick2Net services (seeing as how I already pay for a 100x faster connection).  I made a point to let him know that I never connected to this service, but accepted the resolution.

If you are unfortunate as I was, and Verizon tries to bill you for this, good luck.

I didn’t find anything online with people saying they had this same exprience, so I’m posting this in case others run into this same issue and are wondering what happened.