Evaluating My ISP -- YMobile

About two years ago, I decided I'd had enough of NTT Docomo's arrogance and excessively competitive attitude. And Rakuten had bought out our old wired ISP (Sannet) and was arbitrarily changing things like email addresses and raising the connection rates.

Seriously, we are letting important infrastructure become dependent on companies who can't tell the difference between healthy competition and cutthroat competition. We've been letting the cutthroats win in the market for something like thirty or forty years. Do we have a right to complain that the service has just been going downhill?

Whether we have the "right to complain" or not, how else will the cutthroats understand that we don't want cutthroat competition?

We want competition that gives us options to fit our own needs. That's a good kind of competition. It is right to complain.

Back to YMobile. YMobile was claiming that they could give us cheaper internet and phone if we brought it all under their umbrella. So I listened to the sales spiel and did it. Basic phone, house internet connection, and all our cell phones and my tablet.

YMobile had been pretty good about my tablet, so I thought I could trust them.

And that was a small mistake. 

It didn't end up any cheaper. Might have ended up about a thousand yen more expensive. I haven't really compared YMobile's rates to the other options.

It also left us dependent on YMobile if something should go wrong.

Like now.

Not going to get into specifics, and you can say I should know better, but the real world .... There is one phone being paid out of my account that is not my phone. And the owner of that phone would not log in to check her bill each month, so she could warn me. She warned my once a couple of months back, when she realized that she had accidentally spent about an hour and a half talking on the phone line instead of the Line voice chat line. 

I covered that charge with extra money in the account the next month.

But then this last month's bill comes in, and again it is about JPY 2500 above the base line. And I didn't have any warning, so automatic withdrawal on one of the bills from YMobile bounced.

So I tried to contact them to find out what was going on.

Nope. The local YMobile shops can't tell me. I have to call.

But, nope. Calling just tells me to get on the web and ask them to call me at a specific time.

Well, the specific time has to be chosen from the range of time when I am at work -- 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM. And if you try to use the web form outside that time to reserve a time, it automatically picks a time in that range for you.

So I'm either driving or putting mail in slots for most of that range. If I'm lucky and there's no overtime, I knock off by 6:00 PM.

So I ended up with a reservation to receive a call between 11:00 AM and noon.

So an operator calls me, and she refuses to understand that I cannot talk, that I really shouldn't even be taking the time for asking for a slot after 6:00 PM. After a couple of minutes of trying to get her to give me a slot after six and her telling me she'd need to interrupt my driving later that morning to do so, I had to hang up. 

Mail waits better than drivers on the road, but only a little when you have customers that have requested delivery before noon.

No way to ask why the bill is too big without (I am told) talking to a live operator on the phone. 

Now I get a dunning notice. If I don't pay it by the third week after the original date automatic withdrawal date, they'll take the nuclear option -- shut down my house line and send out a bad credit report.

No grace period. (Docomo has a grace period.) Not clear if they'll check whether there's enough balance for a second try at the automatic withdrawal. (Docomo clearly states the date they'll try again on.) 

No time to ask questions, no time to discuss anything.

And, this is explicit in the dunning notice:

「過払い金が発生した場合は、翌月以降の請求分にて相殺いたします。」
"If an over-payment occurs, we'll balance it out on later bills."

They'll balance it out. On later bills. At their convenience. If they notice.

Okay, so I have to pay without finding out why. And then waste time on my days off to hound them until they tell me why. Or tell they won't tell me why, is my guess.

I could pay them another JPY 220 a month per phone to get an (internet-only, disappears after six months) detail listing of calls, but that would definitely make it more expensive than keeping my land phone with NTT, letting my wired internet get taken over by Rakuten, and supporting NTT Docomo with our cellphone payments. And that only works if I can get the person who owns the phone to check.

I can understand not letting me check her detailed phone record, but, although they are happy to let me set her up to auto-withdraw from my bank account, they refuse to tell me how much in advance. She has to tell me, or I just blindly put extra money in that account.

Just imagine what would happen if my mother-in-law or father-in-law were to try to deal with this.

I know, I know, I'm at fault here. Except, not. 

Not if I have to blindly keep extra money in that account, just in case.

Not if there's no way for me to find out what's going on. 

If you're considering jumping to YMobile, think twice or three times about it.

(I'll wait to tweet this and post it in my FB feed until after I waste half my next day off trying one more time to find out what's going on. I suppose I'm going to add that detailed report of calls to all the accounts, even though it will cost more.)