E-mobile: avoid
This is only likely to be of interest to a few people in Japan, but I am one of them so I am going to go ahead and publish it.
I just got off the phone with an e-mobile supervisor called Mr. Fukunaga following a mostly polite conversation about their contract and renewal policies.
I first got a contract with e-mobile in 2008, when they were aggressively subsidizing new laptops if bought with a two-year wireless data modem contract. I enjoyed the laptop briefly, found the usb wireless modem useful for a year or so, then wireless networks appeared everywhere in my life and I forgot about it.
In 2010 e-mobile automatically renewed my contract. During a contract, you cannot cancel it without paying a 10,000 yen penalty fee. This is not particularly unusual with mobile contracts, but e-mobile ups the ante by doing the following:
1. refusing to send you monthly statements unless you pay them (and not offering email ones)
2. refusing to let you cancel your contract except during a one-month window in the year it is up for renewal
Mr. Fukunaga explained that as e-mobile ‘has so many subscribers’ they could not guarantee that they would remember not to auto-renew my contract for another two years, so I have to remember to call them back between the 1st and 30th of November. If I fail to do so, they will gladly renew my contract again for a further two years without telling me.
This is just obnoxious. Their business model seems to be based on signing people up for contracts, hoping they will forget about them, and enforcing draconian cancellation penalties if and when they do remember.
At first they were one of the only options for wireless data, but now that mi-fi devices are everywhere I would avoid this company like the plague. It probably didn’t help that it took me three tries and twenty minutes to get through their automated phone centre to talk to a person.
Anyone have anything good to say about e-mobile?
I’ll make sure you remember and set a reminder in my iCal.
They pulled this stunt on a friend of mine. It was interesting because I was with him at an orientation here when he signed up for it. It sounded like a great idea but I was a little skeptical at the time and didn’t sign up for it. Glad I didn’t.
It’s good that you got his name and are somewhat documenting it for the future. This type of practice really bothers me.
This kind of 2 year contract seems to be all to common with Japanese mobile companies. I can understand being locked into a contract while you are still paying off the cost of a handset, but why do you have to be locked into another two year contract after that?
It seems all smartphones in Japan require a rolling 2 year contract. This is part of the reason why I haven’t upgraded my old keitai yet, which has a contract I can terminate at any time.
OMG, we fell for the same scam! AND my wife and I totally forgot about ours…until I asked my wife to check it..fortunately, we had a few weeks before our contract expired and were able to cancel it in time.
Hope you find a good way to cancel the contract without paying more than you already did…something like, the tsunami took all your paperwork with it…