USA Mobility Pager Service area reduced without notification; Makes customer pay to return their useless pager. Dallas, Texas

My company used USA Mobility's paging service for many years.  A few months ago, I started getting complaints from customers that I was not returning their pages.  (I use the pager as my primary contact method for customers.)  My company is very small and we provide emergency engineering services.  In other words, we need to be reached when we are needed, not days, weeks or months later.

After getting enough complaints, I started periodically testing my pager myself.  After about 10 days, I was able to determine that it worked in the Twin Cities metro area, but not at my home.  As I work out of my home office, that was a big problem.  I called USA Mobility (unfortunately, I didn't check this website first) and they suggested sending a new pager.  A week later a new pager showed up.  It performed exactly the same way.   It didn't work at my home.  (The pager used to work here.)  Over several days and many telephone-tag calls to the customer service/technical people (who were pleasant and professional) it was finally determined that "changes they had made to their transmitters" (i.e. reduced coverage area) was the cause of the problem.  Next was to see if they could CORRECT the problem and re-activate the transmitter(s) that were turned off or re-routed.  Several days later the answer was NO.  Then we asked if the phone number would be released to another pager company so our PRIMARY CONTACT METHOD with our customer base was not lost.  The customer service person had to first see if they "owned" that number or not... A few days later we learned yes, they owned that block of numbers, but NO it would not be released to a competitor.  Result?  We have a pager that doesn't work where we need it to (they reduced the coverage without notifying us)... To add insult to injury, we're expected to PAY THE SHIPPING to return both the pagers.  They [supposedly] are going to refund us the 2 months (more?) of reduced coverage cost.  But our costs were much higher than the $10/mo. service fee.  And we still have to find another pager company.

We were good, loyal clients - always paid on time.  The problem with USA Mobility is that they don't care about the individual customer and how their actions affect them.  Two things they should have done (1) notified customers that changes MAY affect their coverage and offer solutions BEFORE the changes were made, (2) if sufficient solutions were not found, to give adequate time to find alternate solutions BEFORE LOSING COVERAGE!!, (3) offer to "port" the phone numbers to other companies who do maintain coverage in the areas that USA Mobility was abandoning.

Very very poor customer service.  Yes, the phone-support personnel were pleasant and professional.  We'll see if the refund comes through in a timely manner or not.  Other reports about USA Mobility make me wonder if we'll see it at all.

Our company is an engineering firm -- it scares me to think of medical professionals or government (FEMA?) emergency personnel RELYING on this pager company's service.  We lost some business income and a bunch of time --- makes me wonder if any LIVES were lost due to "holes in pager coverage" of emerency service professionals using USA Mobility pagers.

Scary.  Very scary.