I have written and spoken extensively about the absolutely awful experience my wife and I had this past January, when Verizon accidentally unplugged my Fios Internet connection and left us without Internet connectivity for 8 days. Never in my wildest imagination did I expect to relive that horror. But relive it I did, this time with T-Mobile.
On Sunday, September 18, 2022 at around 11:00 am, our T-Mobile 5G Home Internet became almost totally unusable. A quick search using my phone revealed that there was indeed an outage. The thing is, it wasn’t an outage. It was scheduled maintenance to “modernize” the service. I had no idea this was going on. I received no communication from T-Mobile related to any scheduled maintenance, or any information pertaining to the nature or duration of the planned maintenance.
To my absolute horror, and utter surprise I learned that the maintenance could last from 1 to 2 weeks, leaving us and my community with badly degraded service so bad that for most purposes the Internet access would be mostly unusable. No Internet for 2 weeks! We work from home, many in the community work from home. How in God’s name could T-Mobile do this to us?
The answer is quite simple. It’s called carelessness. T-Mobile didn’t care to exercise the minimum amount of care or concern for its customers needs. T-Mobile chose to take a selfish, myopic view of what it was doing. In several Twitter messages T-Mobile acted as if I was ungrateful for the improved performance the “modernization” would bring, while at the same time ignoring the fact that their unannounced maintenance was putting my job at risk, making it much more difficult for me to attend my online classes, and maintain a usable connection with my Doctor via Telemedicine appointments.
Sadly, after a full day discussing this issue, T-Mobile was unable, or unwilling to offer any workable solution for restoring my Internet connectivity. T-Mobile’s only solution? Just wait till we’re done.
This is not the proper way to practice competent customer service, and I can guarantee that if it continues, T-Mobile will bleed customers.
As for my wife and I, there is little doubt that T-Mobile’s actions will negatively impact us greatly, and our losses may be substantial. We are going to see our attorney to see what can be done. One way or another T-Mobile will pay for their carelessness.