Your Friendly, Price-Gouging Cell Phone Data Provider

by Doug.Roberts

This is sort of relevant, because it involves an incident that I recently experienced with an application on my Android phone.  Android runs the Linux kernel, so this is peripherally a Linux issue.

I started having problems with Good for Enterprise – Android v1.7.1 yesterday.  Good is a corporate PDA email client often used by corporations, such as the one that I work for.  I noticed that my inbox had stopped updating, and that I could no longer send mail from the client.  I had my admin reset my account and reset my pin, and I uninstalled Good completely from my Android phone, then reinstalled.  I got the setup screen again, and entered my email and pin, but this time I got an error code:  An unknown error occurred. (Error: 0x90047).  I did some searching and discovered a reference which suggested that I needed to call Verizon and request that feature code 73666 be added to my data plan.

I thought to myself,  I have a $30 unlimited internet data plan, but if Verizon wants me to request this feature in order to use the Good client, ok.  I guess.

I called Verizon and mentioned the feature code 73666. The friendly account representative initially said I'd have to upgrade from the $30 data plan to the corporate data plan for another 15 bucks, but if I would hold for a minute she would verify this.  The same story came back: apparently in order to access the Good server, Verizon now required me to have the more expensive corporate data plan. Because I was using the service on my personal device.  You can guess my level of excitement for paying Verizon even more than I already do just for the pleasure of my workplace.

My coworkers on Sprint with Android don't have this issue. If there are any other Verizon/Android/Good users out there who have experienced their Good email service being silently turned off, you might want to check in with your friendly, price-gouging data provider.

Load Disqus comments