Complaint Review: U.S. Cellular - PALATINE Illinois

I don't understand what the confusion is with early termination fees.  It's simple. If you accept a phone at a discount from retail price, you are going to get locked into a plan. Do you think the carriers owe you a device that amounts to a hand-held computer for next to nothing without any ramifications if you jump ship? Listen carefully: YOU CAN SIGN UP WITH A CARRIER WITH NO CONTRACT, AND THEREFORE NO ETFs if you leave. The catch? You pay the full price for your device. Even the simple, cheapo phones retail for at least $150. Mid-range phones to high end smartphones go for about $275-$800. The folks over in Europe do it every day. But, if you accept a phone at a steep discount, and you accept a contract stating that you will pay ETFs if you leave within 1 or 2 years, then for crying out loud, don't be surprised when they enforce this.

Nearly every cell phone company that offers a contact has early termination fees, that does not mean they are a bad company, it is for their protection. If they didn't charge the fee, people would be changing companies everytime a competitor has a better deal, this way, if you want to change companies early, you have to pay. Cingular, Sprint, AT&T, and US Cellular all have these fees. Also that restore fee is due to non-payment of a bill & they turned your service off, I have had that happen to me once since I have been with US Cellular were I was late paying my bill because it got lost in the mail & they cut my service. Otherwise, so far since I signed up in December of 2009 I have been happy with them. But if you are going to base the company on their quality of service by rather or not they charge service fee's, I would suggest going with a pay by month plan or a smaller cell phone company, because all the big one's charge early termination fee's.

You only get charged a $35 Reactivation Fee when you are canelled for non-payment! Next time tell the full story & pay your bills so you dont have this issue! I'm a US Cellular customer & know this to be true as I cancelled my service for almost 30 days & they started my account back up w/the same phone number & NO fee!!

I was once a customer of US Cellular, and I could not stand them.  I enjoyed the free incoming calls and text messages, but I moved out of their service range.  I called them to get a new local area number, this is about 3 yrs ago, and they stated I was constantly roaming and it was costing them money for me to talk, using another company's towers.  They mentioned that after 6 months they would cancel the contract and I would have to pay the early term fee.Of course, I went off.  I cancelled the service and ended up paying the fee anyways.

Now that my sob story is out, I do have to say however that these early term fees are actually clearly stated in the contracts.  Anytime that anyone anywhere signs a cellular service contract, they need to read the fine print thouroughly.  It is clearly stated that you will pay up to so much, which is usually prorated based off of the remaining time on the contract.  In reality, noone that has signed a contract has any right to complain because we, me included, signed a contract stating we will pay it.  I wish it wasn't so, but c'est la vie.