I tried to be a Virgin Mobile customer for 5 hours

I bought Carly an iPad 2 for her birthday. While she’s out delivering the best macarons I’ve ever eaten, sometimes she really needs to send an email, find a phone number, tweet something or look up a map to somewhere. I thought the larger form factor would be perfect for her, and the data plans offered by the various carriers are a little easier to swallow than the voice+data plans offered on an iPhone.

Currently, I’m a Rogers customer (for my iPhone and Carly’s boring phone), and in our townhouse we have precisely zero cell phone coverage. I often have “No Service”, but even if I do manage to squeak a bar, I never answer my cell phone inside as the call is immediately dropped. If I forget to turn on call-forwarding and my phone happens to ring, if it’s important I have to grab the phone and make a run for the exit. By the time I reach the sidewalk in front of our house, I have full bars.

So there’s the back-story.

I wanted to give Virgin Mobile a try on the data plan for a few reasons:

1. I’ve had less than awesome experiences with Rogers in the past, and with a new iPhone around the corner along with a completed / nearly complete contract – I wanted to see if there were better carrier options.
2. I wanted to see if Virgin Mobile would get reception in our house (doubtful, but wanted to see)
3. The plan is slightly better (or so I thought) – $15 for the first 500MB (instead of most of the others which charge $15 for the first 250MB)

I grabbed a Virgin microsim from Best Buy around 8:30pm and came home. The Virgin web site seemed to indicate that these plans needed to be activated over the phone, and can be done super quick and easy. I gave them a call that evening but they were closed (it was after 9pm) – so I just waited til the morning.

So the morning of September 22nd, I phoned up Virgin Mobile to get the plan activated. Spoke to a CSR who took down all my information and told me they needed to do a credit check because I’m a new customer. I told him no problem. He asked for a credit card or social insurance number. I gave him my credit card number.

At this point, I was on hold for about 10 minutes while the credit check was being processed, and when he came back he said “Sorry, I just learned that we can’t activate this over the phone, you’re going to have to go into one of our locations to show them your ID and get a credit check done.” What? Seriously? That’s not what your web site seems to indicate. He told me I could go to any location that sells Virgin stuff like The Source, Best Buy, etc.

Later I happened to be out near a mall that has a “Source” store. I walked in and they were closed for renovations (not Virgin’s fault). So I drove over to Future Shop. The guy at Future Shop says “Sorry, I don’t know why Virgin told you that, we can’t do your credit check or activate your data plan here.”.

So I phoned Virgin mobile back and talked to another CSR. I told her I went to Future Shop and they couldn’t help me. She had no idea why Future Shop couldn’t help me, and reassured me that I could go to any store that sold Virgin cell phone products and have the plan activated. I asked her if I could go to London Drugs (I was within about 10 blocks of one). She said unequivocally that yes, I could go to London Drugs and they would do it for me.

Not believing her (I’d seen this before) – I phoned up London Drugs and spoke to the appropriate people there. They told me over the phone (and saved me a drive over) that they had absolutely no ability to activate the plan or do the credit check that Virgin Mobile was asking me to do.

After that I just gave up. I phoned up Rogers and they added a data sharing plan to my iPhone’s data plan for $10/month and had the whole thing sorted in 10 minutes. I have to say I was really pleased with my Rogers experience and interaction this time around – but seriously, when will Canadian cell phone carriers get their act together?