HOWTO - Cancel a Verizon EVDO Contract Without Paying
There is a simple and nearly foolproof way to get out of a Verizon EVDO contract without paying the early termination fee.
Use a lot of bandwidth. Lots and lots of movies, music, and CD images. Don’t do anything illegal or unethical, just hit youtube.com, video.google.com, Flickr and last.fm. Watch movies, listen to streaming audio while you watch the movies, load up hundreds of pictures in browser tabs while you listen to streaming audio and watch movies. Download a few ISOs from ubuntu.com before you go to bed to keep the love going all night long.
Be sure to chew up at least 10GB in a month. That might be difficult if you have crappy service but if you persist I’m sure that you can do it. If you need some help and run Linux, try the following command from a shell: “wget -p –mirror –span-hosts –timeout=30 http://yahoo.com/”. About the same time your disk is full you should be getting a letter in the mail from Verizon like this one.
Of course all this is just hypothetical advice and any encouragement to actually follow these steps is purely in the imagination of the reader. I don’t condone or encourage these actions. If Verizon chooses to stop waiving the early termination fee it’s not my fault and you will probably have to fork over the bucks or hire a good lawyer. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is cheaper.
[UPDATE]
Looks like Verizon is putting the brakes on a mass exit:
http://www.evdoforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=2366&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=135
Heads up everyone verizon is changeing all customers contracts I just left vzw and signed up with cingular now with vzw if you make any changes to your plan you will have to commit to at least 1 year contract or if you now get terminated for using to much data while under contract you will have to pay the E.T.F. here is the new contact that vzw sent me.
July 6th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
that is awesome! did you know this would happen before you tried it?
July 6th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
July 6th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
I had no idea that I was breaking their terms of service. I’d read about people getting canceled for doing some of this stuff or running p2p but I was careful and kept it to a minimum.
Most of my bandwidth was chewed up on Flickr. I have a lot of contacts and look at a lot of photos and upload plenty myself. The rep I talked to hinted that Flickr might count as “file sharing” and violate the terms also.
July 6th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Wow, that has to suck. I can understand their concern, but they have to state things like that more clearly in their TOS. And to say that flickr is the culprit, all I can say is, “wow, that sucks.”
July 10th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
[...] My husband’s friend and co-worker, Anton, wrote an excellent tongue-in-cheek article about his experience with Verizon. That ISP recently dropped him for using too much bandwidth. Hearing that is enough to make any blogger grumble, but Anton flips the story to put power back in the hands of subscribers. A great read! [...]
September 15th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
[...] http://anton.lr2.com/archives/2006/07/06/howto-cancel-a-verizon-evdo-contract-without-paying/ [...]
April 4th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
[...] went through this same problem with Verizon last summer. It’s good to see that they finally admit it to the [...]