In December, I received several text messages from the satellite internet company that our data was running out and that we should renew. I was a little concerned since I knew that we had only signed a contract for five years, and I wasn’t sure when that contract expired and what would happen after that to our service. Would they come and get the antenna? Would we just not have a working connection?
So I dug out the contract and read it through again, but I still had questions. I had my son try and call via Skype, but the number went to a fax machine. Then I tried to have him use the “chat” option on the website, but there was no way to submit a question. So I had to put saldo (money) on my phone and try to call from there. Lo and behold, the call went through. He talked to a representative who said that we could continue paying our monthly fee and they would continue providing service even though we had fulfilled the terms of our contract, which expired in November. He even managed to get my email contact information corrected. It’s only been wrong since we signed up.
Because things seemed so uncertain with the satellite internet, we decided to see what we could do to improve or upgrade the other internet service we have. Well, that mission was a bust. The place where we had contracted the service said that our service could stop at any moment since they no longer have the portable modem setup plan. It’s not that great of a service, but something is better than nothing, right?
So our next line of inquiry was to find out if TelCel had anything we could use. Remember, we have no landlines for TelMex to piggyback on. We borrowed a water bill from my sister-in-law and headed out to the mall to ask.
Since my son had never contracted any sort of TelCel service before, he was asked to provide four phone numbers. One was to be a house phone, one a work phone, and two references. At least one of those needed to be a número de casa (landline). Ugh! Nobody we knew had a landline in Moroleón.
We took the form and went home to try and figure something out. We used my cell phone as the house phone and my friend Claudia as the work number. Then my sister-in-law’s cell phone was one reference, and my friend in Mexico City gave us her house’s phone number to use. Back to TelCel we went.
This time the holdup was that my son’s CURP (personal identification number) listed on his INE has an “e” instead of an “m,” and the computer system kept rejecting it as a valid number. My son was born in the U.S., making him an “extranjero” rather than “Mexicano” at least according to CURP. It took several hours, but eventually, someone managed to override the system into accepting his CURP.
He contracted the service for 30 months, took everything over to the other counter, and paid two months in advance, plus the cost of the modem. It ended up being about $2000 pesos, give or take. He also got a TelCel stuffed toy, it being Christmas and all, no charge.
Monthly, it’s the same price as our main (not satellite) internet, although apparently, there’s a 200 yearly charge added on for whatever reason. It works as well as the other internet we have, and my son is happy since he doesn’t have to work around my teaching schedule to use his laptop. Of course, if either of our internet services decides to stop providing service, that might change, but for now, we’ll take it.
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