For those that know us, Erin and I are switching from T-Mobile to Verizon for our cell phones. We’re keeping the same numbers but in the meantime there may be a brief outage of our normal numbers. The new phones should arrive tomorrow, so hopefully the outage will be brief.

My company has corporate discounts with all four major providers. Right now Verizon is offering a nice phone I’ve been considering for a while for just $50, and buy one get one free. Win! On top of that, we’re switching to a family data plan. It’s more expensive per month, but with more minutes and, more importantly, data features. T-Mobile sucks on the data, and has lame phones.

My discount gets us $20 off the plan per month (nice), no activation fees ($60 as a one time fee, ignored, very nice), and as a cherry on the cake, free overnight shipping.

The downside? I’m paying termination fees, about $250 worth. That’ll hurt, though we can afford it without too much of a problem thanks to robust savings. Still, it should say something to T-Mobile that I’m paying money to get away from them. Why leave? The crappy phones and crappy data plans are a start. I’ve had my current t-mobile phone forwarded to my work blackberry for months now because it’s just crap. But they’ve outright ignored a few customers service requests/complaints (about the lame phone), and their coverage is kinda weak in some areas too. On top of that, they have plans to go to sim-card-less phones, meaning you couldn’t possibly take it from one carrier to the next. That angers me a great deal, even if it doesn’t affect me now or even in the near future.