T-Mobile Customer Service Fail

I was in Seattle recently, helping work an event booth at the Bite of Seattle, and we needed to upload a bunch of photos.  The available free WiFi options were pretty poor, so we purchased a T-Mobile wireless hot spot. They offer high performance network connectivity, and contract-free data plans that can be purchased or re-charged easily.  As in so many situations, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once we got the hot-spot set up, we had network connectivity but it was insanely slow.  I put my phone in airplane mode and connected only it to the hotspot, then ran the SpeedTest.net app, and got 13 kbit/sec down, and 9 kbit/sec up.  That works out to 2.96 hours to upload each photo.  Obviously, that was not suitable.  At other times, I did get somewhat better performance.  When I thought to get a screen capture (Thank you, Ice Cream Sandwich!) it was up to 31kbit/sec.  Now each upload would be slightly less than an hour!

Rather than throw more time and effort down this particular rat hole, I decided to take the easiest of consumer outs and just return the product that clearly didn't meet any reasonable user expectation.  At my local T-Mobile store here in Santa Clara they gave me a prompt and courteous refund of the purchase of the hot spot, and didn't even try to ding me for the $25 restocking fee they warned of when I purchased it.  But they wouldn't refund the $35 for the useless 3GB data plan at which I had barely sipped.  For that, they said, I would have to call T-Mobile Customer Service.

What followed was a customer service experience surpassed in badness only by the U.S. Postal Service.  The Postal Service was worse only because the folks at T-Mobile pretended to care about my annoyance.  Over half an hour on the phone I was transferred from tech support, to customer care, to prepaid refill, to payments, to refunds.  Although T-Mobile runs the network, conveys the data, tracks the usage, and can recharge the account when needed, they had no mechanism to verify (and thus refund) the 3GB data plan purchase I had made.

At the end, they said that I would have to go to the T-Mobile store where I purchased the plan to get a refund.  That, I pointed out, was in Seattle.  Well, then, I'd have to go to a local T-Mobile store.  That, I pointed out, was who sent me to call them.  Ultimately, they won, in that I gave up, and decided to instead just tell them they suck, and expense the $35 rip-off.  I will yet contest the charge on my credit card, since they didn't actually provide the service I paid for.  Even then, I may or may not get my money back.  At least the Post Office eventually gave me a refund in stamps...