Question about international rates

I recently did something really boneheaded. I had to make an international
call on my Sprint phone, and since I don't have an international calling
plan with Sprint (I rarely need to make such calls), I dialed my calling
card's US number, looked up the international #, but instead of hitting
"Send Tones" as I normally do, I call the "Call" button. What this did was
essentially dial the # directly from my Sprint phone, not through the
calling card. In fact, I should have realized this when I got a hanging up
sound a minute into the call, but instead continued with the call.

The call was just under an hour, and when I finally put 2 and 2 together and
realized what I had done (and verified it by looking at my outgoing call
log), I looked up Sprint's rates and saw that while this call would have
cost $0.09/min if I had the $4/mo international calling plan, it actually
cost me $1.33/min w/o the plan. That came out to around $73--ouch!

I called Sprint today to explain the situation and see if they could lower
the cost of the call because it was due to my mistake, or offer me a service
credit to partially offset it, but no dice. The best they could do was give
me a one-time service credit of $5. I even had the agent talk to a
supervisor about it but that's the best they could do.

I suspect that I can get a bit more out of them, but I'm not sure how. I've
been with Sprint for nearly 8 years now and currently pay them around
$125/mo, so they've made a decent profit on me. I don't upgrade phones very
often--in fact I'm currently on only my 2nd phone--so they recovered their
equipment and startup costs on me long ago.

Any suggestions or ideas as to how I might be able to lower the cost of the
call or otherwise offset it? I fully admit that this was my mistake, not
Sprint's, so they don't "owe" me anything. Still, I'd think that they'd be
willing to do something to help a long-time customer in good standing. Plus,
the non-plan international rates are unbelievably expensive, reminding me of
what my family paid when we made international calls in the 70's, and had to
keep calls to around 5-10 minutes.

--
Kovie
[email protected]zen

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› See More: Question about international rates

Actually, I was on the phone to *2 yesterday to enable international
calling on my phone. I wanted to be able to call England. I did not
sign up for the $4 plan, but if I do, it will only give the good rate, I
think it was $.06/min., for calls to a land line, not to a wireless phone.

Maybe you can sign up for that monthly plan [$4/mo international
calling ] retroactivly.

I like OneSuite.
Incredibly low long distance phone rates. As low as USA-Canada 1.9CPM!
Works as prepaid phone card. PIN not needed for calls from home or cell
phone. Compare the rates at https://www.OneSuite.com/ No monthly fee or
minimum. Use Promotion/SuiteTreat Code:
"FREEoffer23" for FREE time.
Altho from USA payphones there is a surcharge, there is NONE from
Canadian payphones.

[email protected] wrote:
> I like OneSuite.
> Incredibly low long distance phone rates. As low as USA-Canada 1.9CPM!
> Works as prepaid phone card. PIN not needed for calls from home or cell
> phone. Compare the rates at https://www.OneSuite.com/ No monthly fee or
> minimum. Use Promotion/SuiteTreat Code:


I also love onesuite. Call England all the time at 2.2 cents a minute.

Kovie wrote:

> Any suggestions or ideas as to how I might be able to lower the cost of the
> call or otherwise offset it? I fully admit that this was my mistake, not
> Sprint's, so they don't "owe" me anything. Still, I'd think that they'd be
> willing to do something to help a long-time customer in good standing.

The only thing that _might_ have an effect is if you call to cancel
service. But be prepared to actually cancel if they don't do anything
for you (presumably you're not under contract right now). And of course
you can't really cancel that way, because you lose WNP, but you can call
and play dumb and ask about how you transfer your number to Verizon.