Thought I’d give y’all an update on my switch to Net10 for cellphone service. I’ve literally spent over 4 painful hours on their tech support line but everything is now settled and working.

Why did it take 4 hours? An MVNO like Net10 uses a hosting cellphone company’s network and voicemail (in Net10’s case, Cingular). The MVNO provides all the customer handholding itself. To minimize costs, Net10 of course oursources its front-line support to Belize. To gain even greater savings, Net10 uses VoIP links to Belize. Thus, when one calls their support, you have network latency issues, dropped packets, AND a cultural barrier in addition to the language barrier.

The folks on the other end are polite and are as professional as they could be. Gosh darn it, they really do seem to want to help. Unfortunately, the bad connections and cultural divide are hurdles just too high to overcome. When you provide information to them, they repeat it back to you digit by unending digit. Providing them a twenty-digit IMEI number (in other words, the phone’s serial number) is an exercise in insanity.

I also hear them say “I’m waiting for my system” quite a lot. At first I played along and assumed their call center had sucky Internet connectivity. After my last call, though, I realized the agent is simply plugging my complaint into an internal search engine and the wait is for the result. I’ll tell you more about that call in a moment.

I ordered a refurbished Motorola V171 from their website for $50. It’s a great deal: phone plus 300 minutes for 50 bucks. My only beef was the phone didn’t seem loud enough for driving around in my noisy Honda CR-V. I called them back and got an RMA for the phone. They quickly had a postage-paid box shipped to my house and a new phone in my hands, only it wasn’t the phone I asked for. It was another V171 when I asked to try a Nokia phone. The rep had noted my call as “phone defective,” rather than actually listening to what I was asking. The mighty search-engine strikes again! Fortunately, I found that I’d only thought I’d turned the phone’s volume all the way up but it still had a few notches to go. When I upped the volume everything was golden.

For a while I had two cellphones. To avoid paying outrageous forwarding fees to $print, I put an “extended absence” message on that phone’s voicemail, directing callers to my Net10 phone. I then went about the issue of porting my old number to my new phone.

Here’s where the fun really began. On November 30th I spent another one of my hours talking to the Net10 rep to get this porting done. They put in the paperwork and told me I’d be getting a new SIM card for the port (which also entails reprogramming all your phone book entries, by the way). The only problem is, Sprint ported the number and Net10 never sent me my SIM card. Callers to my old number were sent to hyperspace while I wondered when my “any day now” SIM card would arrive.

Time marched on. Lives were born and lost. Planet Earth sailed farther around the sun. I got sick of waiting and burned another hour on the phone. “It has already been mailed,” yada yada yada. Give them a few more days.

Kelly goes through the porting routine herself. When her card doesn’t arrive as promised, she lets the rep have a piece of her mind. Somehow she gets a native English speaker on the line. The next day, her new SIM card is in her hands. While she’s on the line with the clueful rep, she helpfully has them ship a new card out to me, too. Saturday before Christmas was the promised arrival day.

Of course that didn’t happen. The day after Christmas the card finally arrived. Finally I had all the parts to do the port. Another frustrating telephonic visit to Belize and I had my familiar cellphone number on my new phone. All seemed good, right?

Wrong. The new SIM card had no voicemail number programmed into it so I didn’t know how to retrieve my messages.

Friday was my last communication with my friends in Belize. After reading and rereading the zillion-digit IMEI number and explaining at least four times that I simply needed to know which number to dial to retrieve voice mail, I heard the clueless rep begin reading the script for resetting the voicemail password. WTF?!?

“I’m sorry,” I said politely but curtly. “I don’t think you’ll be able to help me. Goodbye.” I hung up the phone before strongly considering hurling it across the room.

Here’s when I finally got wise. Net10 is owned by TracFone, a Miami-based company. Their letterhead has their corporate number on it, which can also be used for support. I called it and got a cheerful American voice on the first ring. In another moment, I was speaking with an American tech who not only corrected all the problems introduced by her Belize counterparts, she waited on the line while she hustled the Cingular rep through the process of setting up my voicemail. Only when she had verified the voicemail was working did she let me go, and by this time it was closing on 6 PM on a Friday. In other words, their internal support did an outstanding job, in contrast to their well-meaning but hopeless outsourced call center.

So where does that leave me? It was a lot of pain to get here, but I’m now satisfied with my service. I love not paying for my phone when I’m not using it, I can carry minutes over for a whole year, and if something fancier catches my eye I have no draconian contracts locking me in. I can think of little reason to call Net10’s support department again now that things are set up, so the earlier bumps don’t really concern me. Especially now that I know which number to call.

This MVNO stuff is frontier-type stuff. It can be frustrating and bewildering. If you know what you’re doing, though, you can get the same service coverage and features that you’re using now for a fraction of the cost. To me that’s worth a little bit of trouble.