Goodbye CenturyLink, Virgin Mobile, hello Project Fi

If I haven't made it clear elsewhere in this blog, I'm a bit of a cheap bastard.  That said, one place I've spent needless amounts of cash is my phone services... which is to say, I kept a land line for far too many years.  Mind you, I did get some entertainment value out of it, giving it out as my phone number (technically true) to a great many businesses and getting to listen to it ring, and there is some security benefit to a hard line, but, even stripped down as far as I could get it, that land line still cost me about $33 per month.  Combine that with about $39/month for cell service through Virgin Mobile, and that's much too much, especially for phones, which I don't much care for to begin with.

Enter Google's latest tentacly arm of world domination, Project Fi, a cell service that piggybacks on Sprint, T-Mobile, and Wi-Fi.  Only downside is you have to use a Google Nexus phone, but, as part of their open-to-the-public deal, I could get that for $150 cheaper than usual... and get a fully up-to-date phone that actually gets security patches and the like in the process.  Oh, and, in my case, service comes in at no more than about $35/month, thanks to my limited mobile data usage... but, whatever you pay for data, any unused data, they give you credit for.  Not, mind you, "rollover" data or anything like that, but actual money credit against your next bill.  If it sounds at all interesting, you should check the link above, I'm sure Google will do a much better job of selling you than I can.

Of course, getting new phone service isn't a hard thing to do, but, in this age of "customer retention specialists", getting rid of your old service can be a pain.  Of the two, I expected CenturyLink to be the harder to get away from, so, for that and other reasons, I decided to try for the fait accompli, get that number transferred over to Project Fi, and follow up to handle any remaining issues thereafter.  For anybody that wants to try that themselves, it was fairly straightforward... just use the account number listed on your statement, without any spaces or dashes, and your PIN should default to the last 4 of your SSN.  In my case (once I got the account number right), it took 2 business days to transfer the phone number, and they automatically scheduled the disconnect for 2 days after that.  I don't expect any further issues with CenturyLink at this point, but I'll be sure to update this post if I do.  Likewise, I don't expect any major issues with canceling my Virgin Mobile service when I'm ready to do so (it's prepaid, after all), but I'll post again if that turns into anything messy too.

Update:  Three weeks on, and it's so far, so good... CenturyLink disconnected as expected, my final bill was a negative balance, and I received a check for that amount recently, so I think that's pretty well wrapped up.  Virgin Mobile is still a bit in the air at the moment... their website and automated phone support don't have an option to outright cancel, so I used their "contact us" tool to let them know I intended to cancel on April 18th, and got an email reply from someone who, well, English wasn't their first language, saying they'd have a specialist contact me.  Got a callback on the 20th, from somebody who got bad info as to what they were calling for... once we got that straightened out, they told me that, since my credit card was no longer on the account, it would just expire after 60 days... so, we'll see what the story is once a payment doesn't hit their service.