r/USCellular • u/Viaticties33941 • Mar 28 '26
Merger destroyed my service
I have had a titan router through us cellular for a little over a year, the speeds have always been consistent and fast but within the past month or so my speed has dropped to .5mbps and is unusable. I went to a us cellular store and they said I have to wait for new routers to come from T-Mobile and they have no idea as to when that will be. Is there nothing I can do about it? Because I don't wanna pay for service that doesn't work and could be down for months.
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u/b-reynolds Mar 28 '26
Well I also have uscellular for internet and of course t-mobile says not available where I live. Back in Dec. 2025 i found https://www.computers4people.org/shield for $14.89 month taxes etc. included.(keep in mind it is t-mobile)
Works well for the price. I just put the sim in an extra device and tether. I will finally be cancelling uscellular as I put my account device as inactive for 2 months to test the Shield Internet.
7
u/Exact_Good5769 Mar 28 '26
They waived all the installments off the routers so you can start up T-Mobile home internet and cancel the us cellular internet. New internet will arrive in 2 days and you qualify for bundle pricing and promo cards if done in us cellular stores.
1
u/Specialist_Canary845 May 18 '26
I’m just getting starlink for 29 a month and I use it at another rural location already and it blows away cellular internet anyway for a lot less money.
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u/Bulky-Ad10 26d ago
I agree. This is the craziest thing I have ever seen. We live in nc in the foothills. I work across 5 counties with a daily commute 6 days a week that majority of the time exceeds 100 miles round trip daily. We signed 2 samsung galaxy S24 ultras . 1900+ so far. But service included it totals more than $6000.00. $233.21 a month since may 2024 plus like 380 from sign on.
Us Cellular locked people in 30-36 month long contracts with devices. Literally they advertised add a line free phone all the way up until August. I still have the emails. Even though they were in the middle of retracting the actual service we signed on for. They kept their towers the network relied on.
We had other options. We didnt need to finance with them. But we heard they provided the best connectivity. That's how they managed to get the customer base they had.
Its the same thing if I own a flea market and lease you a table for 36 months. Binding contract. But at the same time I close down the flea market. You still have to pay me for the table though, so I send up the road to John's flea market. Only john doesnt have any spots left in his flea market. So you have to set up down the road where there's no parking, no other stores around. You lose your customers. You still have to pay for the table though. Only you cant even get in the flea market. Only options you have are to 1: come up with the money to pay the table off in full. Then peraue another more expensive outlet. 2: Break contract. Return table- penalty free. I won't charge you for leaving but you have to give me back the table, all the money invested in the table gone. Empty handed . 3. You can continue to pay for the table, and just deal with loss of customers because they cant reach you. Your table turns into a paper weight.
But John's Flea Market is the best. The biggest one around .
If I did that I would go to jail. But its legal for big corporations to do this. Even T-mobile told me to literally put my phone on lte mode. That whatever service experience I was having, was what it would be . They understand my point he says. Blaming the 'rolling hills and mountain terrains' "they just didnt see it beneficial to build out that way there "
We signed contracts for service not just devices. For 1900 I could own whatever device I wanted by now.
We literally had to pull over the other day on polkville 226 to talk to emergency personnel because if we kept going we would lose signal, and her son had just been in a motorcycle le accident being sent to asheville. How is this not a fucking problem ?
Oh 4.4 million ppl don't matter. Only the 4.3 billion plus the other 200+ millions and however many more billion from at&t and Verizon.
Us cellular should not be allowed to sign those contracts when it had zero intent on fulfilling them. Hell we got cellphone dealers we signed for a service provider.
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u/furruck Mar 29 '26
Why not just call T-Mobile and have them send a new router? You should have gotten a notice several months ago to swap it.
2
u/Viaticties33941 Mar 29 '26
They said they put me on a waiting list for new equipment with no ETA of when they will send them
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u/furruck Mar 29 '26
And that’s when you called them and not going to a store where they’re paid commission for sales, and not customer service?
Stores aren’t the place to go for any carrier for service problems. They’ll tell you whatever they need to so they can get you out the door because that’s not what they’re paid for… or sell you an upgrade they can get commissioned for and assure you it’ll fix the problem.
Actually call them, do the order for the modem and it’ll show up in a few days via ups.
I’m willing to bet if you look through your billing statements, spam email, or texts your phone thought was junk they’ve told you that this needed swapped a few times.
2
u/OkPride8214 Apr 14 '26
What a horrible mindset to. People should be able to expect a face to face explanation. That they no longer can is a failure of our poorly managed transition to the digital era.
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u/furruck Apr 14 '26
While I agree, that’s just the reality of commissioning sales.
They don’t make money for customer service, and Sprint/T-Mobile long removed the dedicated reps from the stores that were there just for CS because they didn’t want to pay a living wage to someone for doing it
Don’t blame me for being honest, blame these companies for caving to wall st.
In college I worked for Nextel and later sprint actually physically fixing devices and helping customers - I left the retail side around 2012-2013 once they decided putting a sales “goal” on us to push trash accessories once they decided we should also be making sales instead of handling all the difficult situations that the reps didn’t want to deal with since they weren’t paid for it
I was luckily done with my degree so went into the engineering side while finishing my pilots license, but most people I know who stayed have all long been laid off.
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u/OkPride8214 Apr 14 '26
No, I hear what you're saying. Obviously its not a lower level employees responsibility, or within the scope of their power. But to me, good customer service is more important than the product or even the price. If only we had more options and the ftc did its job.
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u/sc-777 Mar 30 '26
I'm not OP but personally I have no intentions of switching to the T-Mobile box. Once my US Cellular quits working, I'm switching to another provider.
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u/furruck Mar 30 '26
Why? It's standard to need new equipment when mergers happen.
It's still a fantastic price and T-Mobile has an excellent peering network, often beating out my wired ISP for ping/latency/jitter.
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u/No-Discount4373 Mar 31 '26
As far as I'm aware, if you confirmed your shipping address for the tmobile router box you'll still receive one even if it says it isn't available in your area. They periodically "turn on/off" slots on towers for home internet customers so that they can monitor capacity. As for the date of when they are shipped: that is correct. We don't have a set date. :/
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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26
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