Verizon trying to gouge during a crisis?

[ipig]

I am on the west side of WA state, where the weather took a bad toll.

I've been able to roam onto verizon from my house & make local calls using 10 digit #

(sometimes sprint signal is shotty & i have to) (actually, sprints signal is always shotty but 9/10 times a re-dial gets me back on sprint)

Up until this morning/afternoon - I have tried no less than 20 times, all day long to complete any call

Somewhere between this morning & afternoon, verizon's automated message changed to something along the lines of:

"Welcome to Verizon Wireless" & ~please wait while we transfer you to an "external operator" for you to then ultimately enter a credit card (or call collect) & pay to complete the call,

- then verizons msg actually spams you with advertisements if you hang on the line, keeps trying to get you to press #1 to receive a free $100 something or other offer, wtf

Haven't been able to make a call since this change.

The timing of this smells, new outages (the storm, etc) were long over. During the worst of the storms (yesterday/day before) this never occurred. Sprint users are still being crammed over to verizon so on the face, this seems more like verizon jumping
on an opportunity... but late..

Nothing has been changed on this phone (Tour, ugh). I spoke with sprint (after driving to the other side of town) & they just suggested a battery pull, which not surprisingly did nothing. They hinted at my phone needing an update. But i'm not convinced.

I don't get why all of a sudden, within the last few hours i'd need an update sent down from sprint to avoid having to pay money to verizon to make calls, it just doesn't seem to add up.

[rdiddy_25]

Updating ur prl may solve ur problem. Can't make it any worse than u have it now.

[ipig]

I just spoke to a friend w/sprint who lives about 4-5 miles from here who described the exact same problem to a "T"

It certainly doesn't seem like our phones would synchronously all of a sudden be the issue.

Yesterday Sprint told me they couldn't push a PRL while i'm roaming, so.. yeah..

[SwitchBeach]

Why are you blaming Verizon for the fact that "sometimes sprint signal is shotty"?

If you are roaming and don't have coverage and you roam onto a tower with which your carrier doesn't have an agreement, then you have to pay. Plain and simple.

[ipig]

Switch: Verizon never charged for local calls while roaming until the convenient timing of what happened here. I've now heard the same complaint again from a sprint user in a town about 30 miles west of here.

[pauldriver]

Call the FCC