 |
| Wave C Beta Now Open Notification |
They are only giving people who are in Wave C only sum total of 7 days to claim their spot and pay for their new phone(s). They had originally promised they would give everyone in a given wave “a week or more in advance by email” before sending out the notice that it was time to buy. This would have totaled a minimum of 14 days for people to act. Effectively, they have cut the wave timeline in half. See #2 in this screen shot below of their beta signup confirmation email. This is not being done. So Wave C beta registrants have only 7 days, including today, to find an extra $200 if they want in.
When confronted with not following what they had promised to do, their public representative on Facebook, Tiggs, replied: “We said we’d send a heads up email to let you know your invite was coming in seven days, but we were excited to finish our items earlier than expected and decided to open Wave C rather than making Wave C wait another week. Sorry about the inconvenience! (Just to clarify, if you received your Wave C invitation, they’re set to expire on August 23, so don’t delay!)”
This is not the first time that Bandwidth.com, their parent company, has played fast and loose with product rollouts. Their Phonebooth product rollout was marred by multiple slipped software update timelines, the inability to purchase additional minutes of use on their free product, and significant outages on their paid product as they went through growing pains.
I have an email in to Brian Dally, Republic Wireless’ General Manager (brian@republicwireless.com), asking him to honor their original promise to beta customers by extending the invitation deadline. As of 4:15pm on Thursday, August 16, 2012, he has not replied. My request was that they extend it until at least August 30th in recognition that they did not provide the promised 7 days advance notice that the beta wave would be opening opening.
If you think companies should actually honor what they send to customers in writing, please drop him an email to let him know that Bandwidth.com and all its subsidiaries need to learn to do what they say they are going to do, when they say they are going to do it, and to do right by their customers - even when they are excited.
The main reason this pisses me off is that some of us live on a budget and live within our means. We do not charge impulse purchases to credit cards and this sort of thing does not qualify as something I should take money out of my emergency fund for.
Effectively, Republic Wireless is thumbing its nose at all the customers who practice sound budgeting and financial management. For a company who is focused on cost conscious customers, that would seem, at best, backasswards!
