Are you a Verizon customer? Are you due for an upgrade on your 2-year contract? Well, go in armed with the knowledge that any 2-year agreement signed from today forward is going to have a substantially awful...er early termination clause.

The base fee of $350 is remaining the same - that's the not-bad news (I mean, it's obviously not good news). The problem is that until you're 8 full months into your contract, that ETF doesn't start declining. Previously, you'd shave $10 a month, every month, off your ETF. Eventually, that'd bring you to $120 after 23 months of service, and on the 24th month, the ETF obviously went away because your contract expired. But if you cancelled say, 7 months into your contract, you'd pay $280 to escape Verizon's clutches because of the $10/month reduction.

Now, under the new rules, if you cancel your contract before 8 months of service, you'll be charged $350. Like you would have if you cancelled the day you got the phone. After the 8th month, the reductions begin, and your ETF then goes down by $10 a month for 11 months. At the nineteenth month - mind you, this is 5 months before your contract ends - it will then drop by $20 a month. That means that one month before your contract is over, your ETF will be $140, $20 more than it was under the old policy.

More aggravating is the fact that if you cancelled just 5 months before your 2-year contract expired, Verizon would have you on the hook for $240. That's insanity.

Anyway, the new policy goes into effect as of today. Contracts signed before November 14th are not affected, but anything from November 14th forward will enjoy the now even-tighter embrace of Verizon's contractual stipulations.

Droid-life