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Massachusetts Plans a Cell Phone Bill of Rights
freaktheclown writes "Via Engadget, the news that Massachusetts' state legislature is considering a cell phone bill of rights, which would 'limit contracts to one year, require easier to understand monthly bills, and force carriers to fix dead zones.' You may recall that California adopted a similar bill of rights last year before it was shelved last January."
Also, fixing dead zones, AFAIK, would require more cell towers. If the lack in some areas was due to municipal zoning issues, how is that reconciled? Does the state bill allow the cell carriers to steamroll city/county planning commissions?
That is a big huge if.
The fact is that my town has been trying to get decent cell phone reception for years. We even offered a company rent-free, tax-free use of the land for 50 years. We'll secure it, and bring power to it.
And we'll let them put the blasted thing just about anywhere.
They just aren't interested, as "the service offered is adequate".
You're the one who signed the contract; it's your responsibility to negotiate an escape clause for the poor service after a change of residence. Or, when buying the house, you could have checked cell coverage when seeing how the neighbors are and if the faucets leak. Blaming the company for you not thinking ahead is kind of silly.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
HRmm... odd. We have 6 month limit, and they are forced to tell you the total cost in those six months.
And we still have 15 cents cell phones.
That's in Denmark by the way.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Taxes are just a part of the way people can have their economic freedoms restricted:
4 /econ_freedom/00_summary.html
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/entrep/200
They seem to be in the worst 10, so now who'se letting the facts get in the way.
While going around and calling people dumbasses is fun and all, I must say the parent had a good point regarding your third statement. If you're about to build a house, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to walk around and check the strength of cell service before buying the property. After all, having cell service is pretty important to most people (myself included) and you are presumably going to live there for a while. If you barely get service on your property, then you will have none inside your future house.
If the signal is just weak you may want to get an external cell phone antenna...
What Massachusetts does is essentially engage on behalf of consumers as a sort of collective agent. While you may think this is terrible, Massachusetts is one of the few states left in the union where an individual can actually get good health insurance by self-paying. Here in NY, the self-pay plans are all atrocious, the providers have terrible records of denying claims en masse, and your only choices are POS and HMO (i.e. bad and worse - the coverage sucks compared to BCBS/MA PPO Direct Pay). And an individual plan in MA, while expensive as hell, is still only 60% of the price of the best POS plan available here in New York.
As for "economic freedom", there's generally plenty of it in Massachusetts. It's an incredibly entrepreneurial state, with large tech and life sciences industry presence, a huge venture capital industry, lots of financial services companies, etc. I don't know what kind of economic freedom you mean, but I don't need the freedom to deal with abusive cell phone companies that aren't upfront about their terms or real costs, or health insurance providers that shit on me as an individual consumer because I'm not in a group plan with buying power.
I miss living in Massachusetts and would love to return at some point. If you don't like it, fine, don't go there.
Network development != R&D. Network development means expansion of the network. And that's exactly what universal service fees are for.
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