Comcast Drops Pivot

I got a letter in the mail a couple weeks ago that Comcast will be discontinuing the Pivot / Sprint Cell phone plan effective June 25, 2008.

I was a bit disappointed with this news as one of the reasons I signed up with the service was to bundle my cell phone service with my cable bill. One less bill was really appealing, but the main reason I signed up was the price was about $10 cheaper per month that what I was paying with Verizon.

Current Pivot customers have the choice to continue their service with Sprint for the same price or drop the service without incurring any early termination fees. As an extra incentive to stay with Sprint they are offering one month of free service if you do stay with them.

I did a little research on the current cost and features of plans in my area (New England) and decided to stick with Sprint. For the basic family plan that I am using Verizon appears to be about $10 more than Sprint. Cingular is the same price but does offer rollover minutes but friends that have the service in my area report spotty service. The free month helps and I am not in any rush to buy new cell phones after having my current phones for 6 months.

So overall I am not real happy with the switch but based on the issues I had with Pivot billing and my conversations with billing support I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Comcast Pivot Cell Phone Service

A few months ago I noticed that Comcast was offering cell phone service called Pivot (partnered with Sprint). A nice feature was the ability to just add the service to our existing Comcast bill. Our old cell phone plan was through Verizon Wireless which at the time did not offer the all in one bill option so we switched our home phone service to Comcast Digital voice a year or so ago, further consolidating our bills.

So last year when our contract was up with Verizon we went into our local Sprint store to sign up with the Comcast Pivot Service. With Verizon we were paying around $85/month for two phones. The family plan that Pivot was offering at the time was $59/month. So it was pretty much a no-brainer for us to sign up for the service. You can see the pricing for the plans using the link below.

http://www.comcast.com/corporate/wireless/plans.html

We did have to buy new cell phones. They had a pretty good selection on the phones. We ended up getting the Sanyo Katana II. I think this is a $90 phone but with rebates and promotions we ended up paying just $30 for both phones. We had a little problem with the rebate but a quick phone call to Sprint resolved that.

The service so far has been really good. There used to be a few areas near us where calls would drop but we haven't noticed this with the Sprint Network. The only issue we have had is with billing. The first couple bills we received had an additional charge for equipment protection and we were also being charged for text messages. For both bills I called Comcast and the charges were taken off and I was told they won't be on my next bill, but they were. I am hoping that it gets resolved when my next bill comes.

Update 2/5/2008:
3rd bill with Comcast Pivot andd still getting random additional charges. Unfortunately nobody I have spoken to at Comcast can tell me why these charges keep appearing. Getting a little frustrated.

Pivot also offers a really cool multimedia plan which we did not sign up for. Some of the features included in the mutimedia plan are:

• Access to Comcast Email on your phone
• Radio Channels
• Internet Access
• GPS Driving Directions

At some point in the future we will probably upgrade to the multimedia plan. The cost for upgrading would cost is an additional $40/month which is not really worth it for us right now. Although email access and GPS directions are pretty intriguing.