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California Offers Cellular Bill of Rights
JeremyALogan writes "The Feature has an article about The California Public Utility Commission's approval of the first cellular customer Bill of Rights in the US. The Bill enables consumers to cancel their wireless contracts within 30 days of signing on. It also forces carriers to clearly state their rates as well as critical contract terms in normal size print on their websites (no more fine print). Companies will no longer be able to lump "recovery fees" in with taxes or other government fees on bills." You can imagine the joy with which the cellular companies have meet this prospect. Court challenges will be ensuing soon.
Is it just me, or does anyone else ever go into the SprintPCS store feeling like they are visiting a used car dealership? Besides the clientelle that always seem to be there (people arguing about roaming charges, people 90 days past-due on their bill, someone wanting to cancel service because of a divorce, etc.) the staff almost always has this shady look to them.
About the only place I hate worse than the SprintPCS store is the stupid sunglass counter at the mall.
It's about damn time that the government step in to regulate how these kinds of companies do business. This is actually helpful -- and I'd be willing to bet that in the long-term this kind of regulation actually *gasp* helps cellular companies.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
I'm in the process of getting a cell phone for the first time (I've been a college student who enjoys being unreachable) and am also to a big city. I'm trying to order a phone, have it delivered to me, but have it activated with the big city area code and so on. I ordered from a1wireless.com, but they couldn't verify my address. That's odd, because the USPS can, the electric company can, the cable company can, and the bank can. The guy I spoke with about this was a pain in the ass so I told him to cancel the order. He said that it would be done, but I have yet to receive any email from the company that the order was cancelled. I half expect to be billed for a phone that I never receive.
So I shopped around and found a completely different company. Different website, different deals, different name, different "sales pitch" regarding their phones. So I gave them a shot and ordered a phone. This was about 3 hours after I placed the first order. Here's the really sleazy part..
I was unhappy with the customer support at the first company and I wanted to take my business to one of their rivals. I thought that I had done so.. but my second order number is about 300 higher than my first one, ie the order number at one company was (fake) 423501 and my second order number with a "rival" company was 423811. This could be a coincidence, but I strongly suspect that I'll be dealing with the same bad customer support on Tuesday.
It is a sleazy industry. They must make more money by scamming their customers than providing the advertised service. My girlfriend's provider (SunCom) refuses to provide an itemized bill. They just send her a total and expect her to pay it - or pay the ~$150 early cancellation fee. I called SunCom myself and very politely did everything I could to get an itemized bill. After 30 minutes, the woman told me, "After the first bill has been sent to the customer, it contains proprietary information on our computers and therefore we cannot print an itemized bill and send it out, so sorry." I'm not a dope, I don't believe that nonsense, but the fact is that I could get blood from a stone before I could get an itemized bill from SunCom.
If some government somewhere wants to regulate these assholes and enforce a little truth in advertising, I'm all for it. A free market doesn't work well when there's an industrial scam going on, and that's what the cell phone providers have.
Don't forget, this is the US. Cellular used to be fair, they took a loss on your handset and then recovered it through a year long contract. Later on GSM intruduced the idea of locking the phone so that it would be useless except with a specific carrier. This is where the rift between the US and the rest of the world occurs. Elsewhere in the world, after the cellular company recovered their costs and made some profit they would gladly unlock the handset so you could take it to another carrier if you wished. In the US, this was almost unheard of. In fact, try asking anyone at a retail store about getting this done and 99.99% of the time they'll say it can't be done. The worst part about all of this is that they retained the contracts and have lengthened their times. So you get punished twice, you get a locked phone and you have to sign up for 1-3 years!
Further, if you do managed to unlock your phone, (by hook or by crook) many carriers will refuse to allow it's use with their service! They'd much rather you buy a new phone from them. Then there are the carriers which will allow you to bring in your own handset, but they still want you to sign up for 1-3 years. I've never understood this, there is no loss leader in this situation. They simply enter your information into their system and begin billing you, instant profit from the first bill. (They'll generally want you to pay an "activation fee" $20 for some monkey to enter two numbers along with your billing info?!? That's pure profit!)
Before all of this mess, when you could take your phone to any carrier, the phones were of higher quality because they weren't meant to get thrown away. As an example, look at Motorola handsets of the past. They were far better at receiving signals than the current ones. They were built to last, made of the same plastic used in helmets. They even designed the battery such that if the phone were dropped, it would seperate without breaking it's loking mechanism. You could throw these phones against a brick wall and they'd still work, try that with a modern phone.
Don't forget that all of these re-usable handsets winding up in the trash are bad for the environment. I don't see the environmentalists raising a stink about that, I wonder why?
The Bill enables consumers to cancel their wireless contracts within 30 days of signing on.
That line alone is what I would like in my state. The fine print I can deal with because I actually read it. But I signed up with Sprint a year and a half ago (2 yr. contract) only to realize that the signal at my house was almost non-existant. And since I was planning on using the cell phone when I made long distance calls from home, the lack of signal ruined this. If I had a 30 day trial period I would have switched immediately.
Keeping customers' phone numbers private is a feature of every wireless service provider. In the not-too-distant future, I expect it to become a premium feature -- we will be forced to py a higher price and read even more paperwork before we will be guaranteed that our phone numbers will not be distributed to the next corporate entity that bids on them.
I guess my point is that, while this bill of "rights" appears to be nice, I don't see what it should be such a big deal. Most of the topics covered in the bill seem to be topics that a savvy legal mind could take a phone company to court for anyway.
I was brought up well and have always made this a practice. You can imagine my shock when, upon asking Verizon for a copy of the cell phone contract before I signed (on one of those loathsome electronic signing-pads), I was told that the system was set up so that they couldn't print out a copy until I signed!
On the other hand, I've got to agree with the Governator, if for different reasons. I'm not sure if this is within the power of the commission that did it, for whatever benefit. This kind of power creep is exactly the kind of thing citizens should oppose.
Yeah, but currently the power creep is from the cell phone companies. These restrictions look more like lemon laws than anything.
Ask yourself this: What if you bought a cell with a contract that said it had essential coverage, and it didn't (as often cell companies do)? What if you got crappy reception at your own home even though it clearly says that you are clearly in the footprint? What could you do?
The answer? NOTHING FOR A YEAR. Buy another contract and pray. Smells like bull to me.
Long, long ago in the United States, things such as electrical power, natural gas lines, phone service, and other major mass entities were declared utilities.
Cell phones, through daily use, are becoming more and more important to daily life, and although we have lived without them, we have also lived without electricity as well... so don't even argue that right now. Currently due to tricks that the entire industry uses, they are continuing to charge the same rates for an older technology that is more ubiquitous. The value and cost of cell is dropping. The prices are not. Does that sound like good trade to you? Cell phones, under certain circumstances should be regulated like any other utility, due to the fact that they are a necessity, and they are currently price gouging.
Simply put, if everyone makes you sign up for a year, then you are screwed. The power company CAN'T do that. The POTS phone company cannot do that to you. They are regulated. Granted they are regulated monopolies, but at the same time, if there are only a few major cell carriers left in a few years, you are in the same boat.
Yes, there are alternatives. You can buy cell packages in all different manners. However, if you want one with good coverage outside of an urban market where altrernatives are plentiful, you not only have to pay, and most likely you have to be restricted by contracts.
It is a service. You pay for it. All of the air conditioning services don't come over and tell you that you need to sign a year contract and pay whether you use your A/C or not. The plumber doesn't make you sign a contract. There is no fine print in a plumber. There is no automatic withdrawl, or shady account management.
These days cell telephones are important for the succesful completion of the vast majority of business tasks. Collusion, or restriction of cell phone services by the way of binding contracts or other such behaviors should be considered predatory practice, and it ultimately restricts free trade.
That is why you need some slight regulation. After all, this isn't price restricting... it just sounds like cell phone lemon laws.
I've got to agree with you despite the fact that some overly sensitive cell phone owners have modded you down.
:-)
Cell phones used to be totally out of reach to anyone below a certain income level. In the 80's and 90's, TV and movies turned the simple act of talking on a cell phone into a huge status symbol, to which the masses naturally aspired. Cut to 2004, and many more people can now actually afford this fantastic technology. Unfortunately, a huge percentage of new cell phone users are in EXACTLY the situation that the OP mentions: they want the status symbol even though they can't really afford it. Why should that surprise us in the days of rampant credit card debt and record levels of personal bankruptcy?
Just within the past month, I was in line at Safeway who was paying for her groceries with one of those newfangled food stamp debit cards so I knew she was economically challenged. But to my amazement, she was talking on a cell phone the whole freakin' time she was in line. Now there's someone who's well on the way to financial responsibility and welfare independence...
Meanwhile, as an IT professional who was permanently attached to both a cell phone AND a pager for 6 years, I was only too happy to finally reach a position where I could be rid of both. I now wear my unreachability as a badge of honor!
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
You forget, most cellular contracts include the provision:
x.1) The provider reserves the right to change the terms of the agreement at any time.
x.2) The provider reserves the right to alter it's coverage area at any time.
x.3) The provider will make changes to the terms of the agreement, or the coverage area, available at its website.
x.4) The above changes to your service plan may be made at a months notice.
-----------
SO even if you read your contract, and it verified by a lawyer, your contract is subject to change at any tiem and your provider is not obligated to let you know. The only means of communication is passive, and requires that customers actively seek out details of their contract on a continual basis.
With the advent of "overbuilders" such as RCN and satellite TV such as DirecTV and Dish Network, perhaps cable should be deregulated.
Regardless of how small the "dish" is, many apartment buildings prohibit installation of satellite TV. If they allow it, usually they've contracted with a particular company not of your choosing (in our building, we can get DirecTV if we want, or go with regular cable). There's still no way to choose a different cable company except by moving to another area.
Therefore, market competition still doesn't work for a pretty large percentage of urban consumers, and I'm happy to have cable service regulated.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
a) No fine print ---print will be larger, as it is today on credit card offers
With credit cards offers they need not only a larger print, but also a table in a standard format that explains what annual fees, setup fees etc. are charged. So if the "Annual Fee" box says none, you can be certain there is no "spiffy plastic card rental fee" hidden somewhere else. When I receive and offer, I just throw away the letter and colurful brochures enclosed and go straight to the table.
Hopefully they will be also be required to state the "critical contract terms" clearly like that rather than just print the same BS in larger fonts. Something like:
Activation Fee:
Monthly Service Fee:
Taxes:
Included Daytime Minutes:
Included Weeknight Minutes:
Definition of Weeknights (start, end time)
Included Weekend Minutes
Length of Contract:
Early termination fee:
Where "activation fee" includes all one-time fees you pay regardless of what BS name they decide to call it.
While it may be arguable whether California can impose upon a wireless carrier these provisions and make them stick, there is one way they can make them stick: by denying court access and credit reporting.
If they are not allowed to sue in any California court to collect their unpaid bills if they do not comply, are not permitted to file with any California court or collect upon a judgement obtained from any court or from an arbitration panel, and are forbidden to file with credit reporting agencies reports of bad debts if they do not comply with these rules, they can still be held to them even if they can't be required to do so to operate.
The California Public Utilities Commission has plenty of authority. The California Constitution gives the legislature the authority to write any provision into the Public Utilities Code to regulate any form of public utility even if that provision would otherwise violate the State Constitution. And choosing whether a corporate entity has a right to access the courts and under what terms has long been within a state's province.
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.