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Why Everyone Should Hate Cellphone Carriers
The Byelorrusian Spamtrap writes "Wired Magazine's made its position clear on the state of play in America's cellular industry, delivering a long, satisfying screed on why all of us should stop complaining and do something about it. 'They own politicians - Sure, it's just phones. In a world where worse things happen all the time amid the muck and despair of human existence, having to pay for premium text is hardly worth worrying about, is it? You can (and should) opt out, and not sign on the dotted line to begin with. But today's cell towers might be tomorrow's Pony Express: they're TV stations, internet access, emergency 911 and news networks all rolled into one. WWAN could well end up supplanting copper sooner than anyone expects: do you want these companies in charge of it?'"
Yeah, I think cell phone companies in America suck. What am I supposed to do about it? The author suggests not owning a phone at all. Well, I guess I would do that if I could get a land line. But wait, those are owned by the same companies. The only alternative is phone service through a cable/satellite company, but those companies are just as corrupt and dreadful as the cell phone companies (and in a lot of cases worse). Hell, the state of broadband in America is 100x worse than the state of cell phones, and there is literally nothing we can do about that. Cutting yourself off from the phone companies (a lesser evil) just bolsters cable/satellite companies (a greater evil). The only real solution is some sort of uprising. First senator that gets the ball rolling on fixing broadband (making it comparable to the rest of the world) gets my write-in vote for president.
To answer myself: according to the Wikipedia entry "The Pony Express had grossed $90,000 and lost $200,000" and they lasted a year and a few months. And the owners were able to sell the assets to Wells Fargo mainly on the name recognition, so it wasn't a complete bust.
Yeah, the cellular providers all totally suck ass, I must agree. However, what can we possibly do about it? Nothing, because the alternatives are worse than putting up with it.
Many/most of us require telephone communication. I for one can't simply go without telephone service, if I want to have a decent relationship with my wife and relatives, and if I want to be able to function in society and business and my job. When I finally ditched the landline back around 2002, I was paying about as much for a crappy landline from Qwest with no features as I did for a cellphone. Somehow I doubt this has changed much. I might be able to save a little money by getting a landline from Cox cable (since I already have internet service from them, after all), but then I'd miss out on the versatility that I and so many others have grown accustommed to with cellphones; it'd be a real pain to be out of contact while driving or shopping, in the lab where I work, etc. The few extra dollars per month for cell service is worth it to me.
Am I jealous that people in other countries get far better and freer cellular service than me, for much less money? Sure! But there just aren't any alternatives here.
Until something else comes along that offers a real alternative, I don't see the point in saying "we should do something about it", because we can't. Cellular service isn't like writing open-source software: it requires not just phones, but a network consisting of central offices, antenna towers, fiber-optic lines, and billions of dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. The cellular providers are just following the Golden Rule: "he who has the gold makes the rules", and our stupid government isn't bothering to regulate them to prevent them from acting so poorly.
Maybe eventually some brilliant quantum physicist will come up with a way for us to all communicate using "subspace" or whatever, so with the proper equipment we can just establish point-to-point communications with whomever we please, with no need for any infrastructure or middle-man like these cellular providers, and no worries about having to share limited spectrum. But until then, or until some other alternative is found, or until our government steps in and regulates them (yeah right), we're stuck.
I fully expect that these companies will wind up "in charge" of it by fiat if nothing else. It's only a matter of time. Like the article said, these companies own Congress. Well, Congress makes laws that govern "interstate commerce" (which the courts have interpreted as shorthand for, basically, any damned thing they please), so Congress can, and will, do the equivalent of declaring them as being the sole carriers for this stuff if the competition keeps them from taking that role otherwise.
Didn't you get the memo about what fascism is really all about?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Some of the reasons that people hate cell phone companies have to do with the abusive service contracts which are difficult or impossible to get out of. One way to avoid this is to buy a GSM cell phone with a US SIM chip. This has a side advantage that you can easily use the phone overseas by buying a SIM chip for the country you're visiting. You buy prepaid cards for these phones. Calling is a little more expensive, but you don't have a contract to deal with. There is also much less information about you as a cell phone user, since the only way to track you back to your phone is through the company you bought it from.
In theory if more people used GSM phones and phone cards, there would be more competition since the cell providers can't lock you in to a contract. This is, by the way, the situation in Europe where GSM is the standard.
The REAL question we should be asking is why are none of the companies willing to step up and offer better, cheaper plans? In a free market, we would have the same plans (if not better) as the Europeans do. Businesses undercut each other in a free market in order to steal customers. So why are no cell phone companies doing this? Don't we have laws that are supposed to prevent companies from banding together to screw the consumer? I was under the assumption that price-fixing was against the law (and is clearly what's going on; the cell phone companies have agreed to offer minimal features for similar prices, so everyone gets part of the pie without any real competition)
You say that as if there is any other kind of corporation. Seriously, if you were to opt out of the services of every corporation that has politicians in it's pocket you would be so alienated from society as to be unable to affect any change with-in society. To put it in concrete terms, how are you going to have a house without a bank account? How are you going to have a job without any telephone number? How are you going to vote when you are an unemployed homeless person?
Corruption is one of the prices we pay for having such a large society. Even if all corporations and government entities had wonderful transparency there would be an unfeasible amount of oversight needed to prevent corruption. Here is an excerpt from an article that explains "Why big things fail":
So preventing corruption in our international mega-corps and our global military and our world police government is about as likely as finding a Humpback Whale with no barnacles. It's never going to happen because we are too big to find and reach all of the parasites.
Our best chance at lowering corruption and improving the average citizen's voice in government would be to break up our behemoth government by transferring most of the budget and power to the individual States. But with that transition we would be sacrificing our superpower status and the Federal level players wil never willingly let that happen.
We are all just people.
Is this article and invite for everyone to say why they hate their cell phone company?
I have many reasons, but I'll throw out the most current situation. I'm a customer of the old AT&T. My contract expired but I have an old TDMA phone and they are shutting down the network. Fine, technological progress, I support that part. But, do they have to send me a text message at least once every day to tell me this? I was given an AT&T GSM phone from a friend, but they won't let me use it unless I sign up for a new 2 year contract. I have tried calling customer service and going into the store, but they still won't let me do it. The guy in the store actually said I could, but then he went to do it, asked the manager a question, and the manager shut him down. One of the guys on the phone asked me why I didn't want to sign up for a contract and I told him that I'm getting anything out of it. He said I could get a free phone and I told him that I don't want any of their phones. He asked incredulously if there was no phone they had that I wanted. I said that I kind of liked the Tilt, but part of the reason that I would want it is for the internet and I don't want to pay the $80 bucks a month for the cheapest plan and data. He said that I could get the internet on any phone. I told him that it is hardly usable on a regular phone and he grudgingly agreed.
I told him that if they allowed me to get the $60 iphone plan for a different phone, I would consider it. He said that the iphone is apple's deal. I told him I wasn't talking about the iphone, I was talking about the plan. I told him that I wanted him to note that I suggested it with the hope that if enough people do the same, they can make some f-ing graph to show the decision makers who don't get the pleasure of hearing real customers. I don't think he actually noted it, though.
Anyway, all this because I WAS TRYING TO STAY ON THEIR SERVICE AND NOT GET A FREE PHONE OUT OF THEM!
Well of course the telcos are buying people out. That's entirely why they torpedoed municiple wifi: they are more and more being forced into the role of "dumb pipes", which as everyone knows is really hard to loot money from. They need these other businesses in order to obfuscate what it is they really do.
If municiple wifi becomes a reality, so does their chance to make insane and obscene profit. Sure, it sucks for "we the people", but conservatives don't care, they are too busy spewing their anti-America hate speech.
You're going to hate me when I say this.
:)
I've voted in elections where only 25% of registered voters showed up. That means my vote was worth 4 votes. Assuming you're registered, my voice had 4 times the clout because people like you didn't bother voting. But that's only counting registered, not *eligible* voters who never bothered to even register! In that case, my vote was worth much more than 4.
When you don't vote, my voice gets heard even more, and I'm more likely to get what I want. You may agree with my views, but what if you don't?
See? You hate me now.
I wish i had a mod point for you. I have this view as well, I wish we limited terms as well but that'd be a much more active stance on the issue. This may not work anyways if the party leadership was too powerful - or should I have said "since the party leadership is too powerful."
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I've never owned a cell in the US. Yes, I've spent most of my life there, and in the past decade, I've bounced between Europe and the US, yet spending most of my time stateside. Funny thing, though: while in Europe, cellular communications have gotten easier, to the point where I've now had three separate cell phones, and five separate phone numbers in four countries (including Switzerland, which is right up there with the US in terms of pharmaceutical and cell phone costs), in the US, I have never seen the point in having a cell phone. It just isn't worth it. Phone calls cost. Text messages cost. To get access, you effectively need a paid subscription. Then you need to use their hardware on the network, from which they have removed the balls. Yeah, I know, there are ways around many obstacles, but I'd have to be motivated and seriously mobile to care. I'm not.
It just comes to this: when our country, which should be representing us, sells our resources to private corporations, it has an obligation to ensure that it represents our interests in doing so.
I don't consider it in the public interest when all we get from such a transaction is a couple billion bucks the oligopoly will have a hard time recovering and a parking lot hand job for select bureaucrats. Oh boy. We can finally afford to pay the cell phone companies for that no-warrant surveillance system we always wanted. woop de doo.
"That means my vote was worth 4 votes."
No, it doesn't. The winner is chosen by who has a plurality of the ballots cast. The only way your vote would be "worth 4 votes" is if the election turn-out dropped 75%
"Assuming you're registered, my voice had 4 times the clout because people like you didn't bother voting."
And your voice will be a part of the (average) 40% of voters who didn't vote for the local incumbent/local majority party/whatever. Who you vote for doesn't mater when the party faithful have been carefully corralled into unsurmountable majorities, producing some of the most lopsided election results this side of Kazakhstan.
And then the winner of the election will show his devotion to the people who got him elected, specifically the political party that allowed him to be the sole possible winner in these shake-and-bake elections, and will abide by the calls of his party's whip to vote with the Beloved Party 90% of the time.
The numbers don't lie. Look at the election returns of your district. Check out the neighboring districts. Look around for some non-partisan groups that keep track of such things and check out the winner's party loyalty in their legislative history. If you don't vote for your district's majority party's candidate, whether you voted or stayed home, your "voice" will only be catered to 10% of the time, if you're lucky.
This isn't rhetoric, this is documented fact.
"See? You hate me now."
I wouldn't call it "hate" per se, but whatever it is, it's not for the reasons you think. You've accepted the lie that you actually make a difference hook, line and sinker, and therefore you're part of the inertia that has to be overcome before meaningful election reform can be put in place. You perpetuate this farce by participating and giving it an air of legitimacy.
The main problem is that empires are backed by industrial power. Waging war requires a lot of goods. While the United States economy still produces a lot of military equipment (bullets & bombs, cruise missiles, airplanes & helicopters, etc), production of other goods required to support the economy has shifted over the past 30+ years to other countries: Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, China, etc. The trade deficit has risen concurrently with the shift to offshore production. Trade is fine, as long as it's a two-way street. As it is, the U.S. has been freeloading for a generation, and the piper always gets his due.
This was fine as long as Japan/et al could use their surplus dollars to buy Crude Oil. But now more and more oil-producing countries are accepting (and preferring) Euros/Yen/etc for their product, and are divesting themselves of their dollar holdings. See Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman on how the Feral Government enlisted the Saudi royal family's help in establishing the Petro-Dollar, to help finance their push for Empire. (Saudis bought U.S. Treasuries with all the excess dollars they had).
There was a recession from March-November of 2001. It was caused by Bill Clinton's dismantling of the economy via NAFTA, and the dot-com bubble. Instead of having an orderly restructuring of the economy, GWB, Alan Greenspan and the U.S. Congress worked together to blow an even bigger bubble in the nation's housing markets.
Anyways, the housing market has now 'popped', and it's all downhill for the Empire from here on out. This is a good thing, as the Feral Government's Perpetual War sucks money from the middle class and redistributes it to Wall Street and the Military-Industrial Complex.
Not to imply that the Neoconvicts aren't still a loose cannon. I guess Darth Cheney is gaga over nuking Iran - see Esquire's recent piece, The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know. If Cheney/et al are successful in turning their 'wet dream' into reality, it'll just be that much more Karma that We The People will have to meet, and the depression will be that much worse ('cause China/Russia are fully capable of bitchslapping our now-hollow economy).
Save America: Help Ron Paul, he's our only hope. As the economy tanks over the course of the coming year, Ron Paul's support will continue to grow, while the rest of the Republicrat candidates will have to buy their support one vote at a time.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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Ha, I was a customer care rep for AT&T back around 2002-2003, when they were slowly switching from TDMA to GSM.
Fine, great, GSM's superior in almost every way.
We had an internal website where you could check for known service outages in the event that a customer calls and reports no service or other technical problems.
I can't remember where it was, but mostly in southern california, they had one 'known outage' listed. It explained that the transmit power on cell towers in a given area for TDMA customers was being slowly diminished, in order to make the difference in call quality between TDMA and GSM seem more dramatic. Alongside this were strict instructions in big red letters DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO THE CUSTOMER.
So, customers would call saying "damnit, before X date I was able to use my phone in my house just fine, but as of "fill-in-the-blank-date" it's been the shits, or no service! What did you guys do!?"
So we'd go thru the motions of troubleshooting, but essentially we were 'gaslight-ing' (look up the movie 'gaslight' if you don't understand) our customers.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
It strikes me that Apple did not choose to play the ridiculous game that Carriers play when an OEM launches a new device. Years ago working at SonyEricsson, we could not believe when the geniuses at one carrier came up with MyMediaNet and demanded we modify the UI we had designed - and tested - in favor of this baloney. The carriers are so geared toward generating revenue that they forget what users actually want to use. It seems our friends at Apple told AT&T they're not going to budge on stuff like visual voicemail and we all benefit as a result. More OEMs need to take charge like this.
"Voting doesn't matter, with the possible exception of the party primaries (since the parties function as kingmakers)."
The simple solution to this, though hard to achieve, is independents in each state need to unite and compel their states to allow independents to have their own primary. Basically any independent or third party should be able to get on the independent primary ballot. You would want a low but achievable bar, some thousands of dollars or thousands of petition signatures, to get on the ballot, just to weed out frivolous candidates.
The current system in most states completely sucks since Independents are either completely disenfranchised in the primaries or forced to vote as spoilers in the two party primaries. They seldom get a say in the people who get on the ballot who will probably win.
If you created a system where all independents and third parties could unite to run one candidate against the two parties you might have a chance to break the two party monopoly. There are so many independents, Democrats and Republicans completely fed up with the two parties, you just need to give them a place to channel their anger. A key reason more people aren't independent is simply because they get shut out of the primaries and any say in the process if they are in many states. If you create a viable Independent slate I wager people will leave the two bankrupt parties in droves.
The two big challenges:
A. Getting good candidates with broad, common sense appeal to run in the primary, and not a bunch of unelectable fringe candidates.
B. The two parties will fight this tooth and nail in every state and since they control all the power they will succeed in killing it unless you can get it voted in with a referendum they can't block.
The fact they will fight it to death is the most ringing endorsement of what a great idea it is.
@de_machina
The problem is much larger that just the cell providers. They're probably the worst of the bunch, but they're hardly the only industry with abusive contracts and pervasive fraudulant practices.
The most obvious is the concpt of contracts where one paarty may chang the terms at will and the other is simply stuck with them. I simply cannot imagine a sufficient contortion of reasoning that could make that seem conscionable or that could make any legal system that supports it seem just. For that matter, in a truly just world, the inclusion of such terms should be sufficient to void any contract. After all, nobody who would put such a thing in a contract and then stuff it down someone's throat could possibly be contracting in good faith. Before someone makes the inevitable "you aren't forced blah blah", yes, when most or all providers of a particular service do that, they ARE stuffing it down someone's throat. Becoming a hermit in a log cabin with candles for lighting is not a realistic alternative to electricity and phone service!
Billing errors in general are an issue, plenty of companies seem to routinely make "errors" in their favor (never in the customer's favor) In the case of many cell providers most of the bills they send out are that way month after month and we're supposed to believe it's NOT fraud? They deserve no mercy here. If they billed a million customers fraudulantly, charge them with one million counts of criminal fraud. Only large corporations can seem to get a bulk discount on felonies. If the evidence there isn't airtight, charge them with a million counts of negligence. Surely that has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt over the years. I have deealt with many companies large and small over the years. Only telecomms providers (not just cell BTW) ROUTINELY make billing errors.
Here's a simple one that IS specific to cell phones. They should not be allowed to charge for dropped calls. At the very least, they should be forced to refund any connection charges (since the need to connect again is clearly due to their screwed up network).
Truth in advertising! Is there anyone at the FTC who even knows we have truth in advertising laws? The public SHOULD be able to presume that advertisments are at least basically truthful. Unlimited means without limit. Making promises in bold and retracting them in fine print is a fundamental dishonesty. Fine print on television that is not clearly and easily readable even with 20/20 vision should not be lgally considered to have been displayd at all. Occasionally, out of curiosity, I freeze frame a commercial disclaimer (perfect digital reception) and frequently find that it is greeked, unreadable at any distance from 10 feet away to nose pressed against the screen. How can that possably be considered an act of communication?
Finally, the fines themselves. If they are not at LEAST as large as the ill gotten profit that caused them, they will be (and are) treated as a tax rather than a penelty.