I called Verizon yesterday. The good news is I was not charged for roaming yesterday. He said that if the "Extended Network" message is blinking, that means the signal from the phone is bouncing off something so it's having trouble getting through. It's only really roaming if "Extended Network" is solid on the display, not blinking.
The bad news is that off-peak starts at 9 pm. I thought it was 8. We get 400 peak minutes a month and I've been trying to conserve them for webcasting during the trip, but I don't think we're going to have enough minutes for everything. For one thing, there are night-time events on Thursday and Friday, which will now each take an hour more peak minutes than I had expected, plus a long daytime event on Friday. For another, we've already used more peak minutes than I had intended because the cam test I did last Thursday started at 8.
I think I might drop webcasting the Main Squeeze (Friday night event). Our cars are just going to be parked downtown, it's not going to be that interesting. It's more important to me that we're able to webcast the Main Street Drag (the tour of schools) on Friday afternoon. The Art Car Ball (Thursday night) starts late so most of it will be in off-peak hours. And of course, the events on Saturday (the parade and the illuminated cruise) will be free and clear as far as minutes go.
While I had the guy on the phone, I also asked about a couple of unexpected items on our bill. Turns out that there's a $10 charge for the "in-network" thing which lets us make calls to anyone on Verizon without costing any minutes. I'm a bit pissed off because the guy in the store told me that was free. Well actually, it is free -- for one phone. There's a $10 charge per additional phone on the account. What a rip-off!
Georg and I don't talk to each other (or anyone else on Verizon wireless) on our cell phones often enough to warrant a $10 charge. Except for these parades once or twice a year, we typically only use a small fraction of our minutes. So we're going to cancel the "in-network" charge on his phone. After which I'll be able to call him for free, but if he calls me it will come out of the minutes. I think. It's kind of confusing.
1 Comments
a lot of providers now allow you to pay something like $7 or $10 a month to have the off-peak hours begin as early as 7pm. might be worth investigating...