Signing contracts with phone providers takes just a few minutes but getting rid of them by shutting down landlines and Wi-Fi services may take months.

It can be a real nightmare, as all telecom carriers have pretty much the same rules of cessazione del contratto (contract termination). 

You find yourself left hanging while automatic answering machines and ‘virtual assistants’ drive you crazy. Then, when you manage to get through to a real person, you spend hours talking with different customer service call centers across Europe to make sure your request has gone through.

But in the meantime, while you wait to sever ties with the phone company, you keep paying the monthly bills until it is certain that you are no longer their client.

They make it really hard for you. I spent half of this year chasing after my phone carrier to cancel the contract as I was paying for very poor, glitchy WiFi. The real problem is having to deal with many different call center staff to whom you have to explain the whole story from the beginning, and they often don’t speak Italian or English well.

READ ALSO: How to use your Italian ID card to access official services online

The first thing I did is to call the customer service and communicate that I no longer wanted to be their client explaining the reason, they said, ‘OK, it is done, no worries, within the next 30 days (the time needed to process the request) your contract will end’. 

Make sure you always ask for the ‘numero pratica’ (procedure number) for when you need to follow up. 

But of course it couldn’t be that simple. They told me I would be getting a confirmation sms on my mobile within the next 72 hours. That never happened, so I called back and this time they said I had to wait for the operator itself to call me to ask if I really wanted to cancel my contract, to double confirm the request. 

I received two phone calls after three weeks, during my working hours when I couldn’t answer, and each time I called back I was told I had to wait for another call.

Few people are aware of the tricky fact that if you do not verbally re-confirm the termination request it is void.

Months passed by and nobody called. Four times I picked up the carrier’s call and the connection broke off just as I said ‘Buongiorno’, so I called back the customer service and was told (by what must have been the ninth person I spoke to) that a verbal cancellation request isn’t enough, and the only way to make sure it went through was emailing the request to the company with my landline number and a copy of my ID.

I sent an email and it bounced back, so I sent a PEC, or ‘certified’ email – including the numero di pratica – and made sure I received confirmation that it had safely landed in the recipient’s mailbox.

You’ll need to beome familiar with Italy’s registered email (PEC) system. Photo: Mario Laporta/AFP

I waited, another two months went by and I had to keep paying the bills as my WiFi and phone services were still ‘on’ but no internet whatsoever. So I decided not to pay them anymore, or delay the payment deadline. That’s when the carrier started sending a private postman to deliver a notification of unpaid pending bills. 

It turned into a six-month hellish odyssey, almost every morning I called the customer service asking about my request status and they would reply I had to wait for the verbal confirmation call from the carrier. I gave them three other numbers they could reach of my relatives to increase the chances that if the operator did call, someone could confirm the deactivation.

The most frustrating aspect, as with most bureaucratic issues in Italy, is that la mano destra non sa cosa fa la sinistra (the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing) meaning each call center agent would say the opposite from another, unaware even that I had forwarded a PEC. So you start quarrelling over the phone, and it does no good.

In August, finally, after re-sending the PEC four times, someone from the phone company reached one of the numbers I had left, belonging to a person who lives with me, who verbally confirmed that I no longer wanted to be their client. Three weeks later my landline and WiFi were dead.

READ ALSO: Disappearing PECs: How lost emails can land you with big fines in Italy

As a result, I now solely rely on mobile connection and ‘fear like the plague’, as my granny used to say, getting entangled again in another phone carrier’s trap. 

This has taught me never to believe when a provider says all you need to do is tell them over the phone ‘hey I want to cancel my contract’, and then wait for their call to confirm it.

There’s an ancient Latin saying: verba volant, scripta manent (spoken words fly away, written ones remain). Sending an official request via PEC to the correct addresses, with numero di pratica, is the best thing to do. 

Calling up a few times to make sure your pratica has been approved is key, if so, make sure you ask the person you talk to send you via email a confirmation that on set date your landline will cease and you will no longer be paying bills.

If too much time goes by, and you keep getting bills, feel free not to pay them. When the phone carrier realizes this it will simply cut off your landline, which is exactly what you want, and there are no legal risks given the PEC was delivered months before.

This however is possible only if you pay the monthly bills by credit card or bollettino postale (postal payment slip). If you have a direct debit (RID) it’s best to rush to your bank to deactivate it when you make the official cancellation request. 

Credit cards can also be tricky: every month for five years I created a ‘virtual card’ to pay my bills and avoid fraud, but often the carrier’s online payment platform wouldn’t accept it. In the end this also wore me out. 

Phone and internet companies should make customers’ lives easy, not complicate things. In Italy however few things run smoothly. 

If you’ve cancelled a phone or internet contract in Italy, what was your experience? Have you got any tips for other readers? Please let us know in the comments section below.