There seem to be an awful lot of lawsuits in the wireless world right now. We first told you in January about a class action lawsuit being filed against T-Mobile for their flat early termination fee (ETF). Now a settlement is in the works. According to the suit, T-Mobile charged many customers $200 between July 1999, through February 19, 2009. The carrier has proposed a settlement which, if accepted, will provide those customers with monetary or some other type of restitution. If you fall into this group, you have until August 23, 2009, to file your claim. No one is specifying exactly how much class action participants will get, whether it will be a full refund of the $200, some other amount, some other benefit, or a combination thereof. This could have a ripple effect throughout the industry, though. Because the company has chosen to settle rather than allow the case to be tried, it can be seen as an admission of guilt of…something. Of what, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just common sense that if you sign a contract agreeing to certain terms in exchange for service, one of those terms being a fee if you cancel before the contract’s natural date of expiration, then you should be required to honor it, just the way you expect the company to keep up their end of the bargain and provide customer service when things go wrong. To cry foul because a contract was enforced seems like cheating. We’ll have to wait and see if the terms of the settlement are made public. In the meantime, T-Mobile’s new policy is to prorate ETFs depending on the length of time the customer has had the contract at the time of cancellation.
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