The basis for the article I was writing was this: How often does Verizon misquote their rates?  It seemed to me that if six managers in a row could be caught on tape misquoting their rates, this had to be a fairly widespread occurrence in the company.  So I called Verizon 56 time over the course of two days, and asked two questions. 

• 1.) What is the data overage rates for the basic 10MB data package for $29.99?
  
  
• 2.) If you get the Core Choice 450 minutes package with unlimited data, what is the data roaming rate in Canada?

I was prepared to receive a few wrong answers.  I thought it was likely I'd be quoted a few of the rates as cents per kilobyte when the operator really meant dollars per kilobyte.  What I didn't expect was how many wrong answers I'd get.  While many operators did mistakenly quote cents instead of dollars, a large portion of the mistakes were simply wrong, regardless of where the decimal fell. This means that even if Verizon has since addressed the cents/dollars issue, that by itself wouldn't be enough. Let me break down some of the more startling results:

• 1. Only 2% of the operators (1 person) answered both questions correctly.

• 2. 52% failed to answer even one of the two questions correctly.

• 3. 5% transfered me because they didn't know an answer.

• 4. 93% quoted an incorrect rate.

• 5. Though the questions only had two correct answers (1 for each question), I received 22 unique responses.

• 6.  The most common response was not the correct rate.

• 7. 50% of the incorrect responses under-quoted Verizon's actual rate by 100x or more.

• 8. Nearly all the operators asked if I'd like to sign up for a contract after quoting a rate.

At the end of the 56 calls, I had no real idea what the correct rates actually were.  To find that out, I had to call Verizon's PR and ask them for a "printable rate" for an article I was working on. 

After you watch the video, you'll discover that the real rate is hardly clear from the response of the actual sales line.

So there it is.  Those are the numbers.  This suggests that if you called Verizon and asked for their data rates at that time (and possibly now, I don't have time to do a follow-up at the moment), the chances of you getting a correct answer are less than the chances of you getting the wrong rate.  If you asked them to compare the rates from two different plans, you have virtually no chance of getting the correct answer. As far as I could tell, there's no reasonable way for a person to find out what the correct rates were - at least not by calling the sales and customer service lines listed on the Verizon website.  You will not know what the correct rate is until you see how much you've actually been charged on your bill.

After 56 calls and more than 100 questions, I could see little relationship between what Verizon representatives said you would be billed, and the amounts you'd actually be expected to pay at the end of the month.

I took this one step farther and contacted a number of different government organizations in an effort to find out what sort of regulations this might fall under.  Turns out that most likely it would count as false advertising, assuming that a) the wrong rate was being quoted before purchase, and b) that the wrong rate would lead you to using the service more than you would otherwise.  The first of these two is easy, since each one of the questions asked was identified as being before purchase, and were followed by asking if I'd like to sign up for a binding contract.  The second is also pretty easy, since I'm likely to use more data if I think the rate is $0.02 per megabyte (most common quoted rate) instead of $2.05 per megabyte (actual rate).

Additionally,  I imagine that there are a great number of people still on contract with Verizon that were quoted incorrect rates prior to signing up.  Between the people on contract because of rate promises that were incorrect, and the people that used data more than they would have if they'd known the correct rate, it seems pretty obvious that Verizon Wireless, aside from possibly breaking the law, is vulnerable to a massive class action lawsuit.

About the Video:

I felt it helped drive the point of this article home if it were accompanied by some sort of video illustrating how varied the calls were.  So, the video on this site is a compilation of some of the recordings I made during the survey.  With the exception of the first time the question is asked, the calls are presented in the order that they were made.  There is no doctoring of the video to make it look better or worse for anyone; I tried not to bias it.  In reviewing the recorded data, I tried to be forgiving, which means if an operator quoted the wrong rate and then changed their answer after I asked them to verify, I gave it to them as a correct answer.  If there was much doubt about the response, the answer was thrown out and not used in the final tally.