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The Irksome Cellphone Industry
gollum123 writes "David Pogue of the NYTimes wonders why Congress is worrying about exclusive handset contracts when there are more significant things that are broken, unfair, and anti-competitive in the American cellphone industry. He lists text messaging fees, double billing, handset subsidies, international call rates, and 'airtime-eating instructions' among the major problems not being addressed by Congress. 'Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising. Why doesn't it occur to them that they'd attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable? By being less greedy and obnoxious? By doing what every other industry does: try to please customers instead of entrap and bilk them? But no. Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.'"
You can't legislate somebody or something into being nice.
DOUBLE BILLING In Europe, youâ(TM)re billed only when you place a cellphone call â" not when you answer one. And youâ(TM)re billed only when you send a text message â" not when you get one. In this country, thatâ(TM)s how itâ(TM)s always been for landlines, too.
That's not completely true. You are billed if you receive the call, provided you are not in your home country (if you are in France spending a few days of vacation, and your contract is with a Spanish operator, then you get billed if you got a call while in France). Fortunately, the European Comission is working on reducing the prices for that double billing. It is something that I guess lots of people in USA would like to see Congress doing.
The OP just did posted this so that he could say that he gave the 'correct answer' to the poll.
... RUN AWAY!
[NO CARRIER]
I got 2M unlimited (really unlimited) data plan on my cell phone. Costs roughly 10 euros/month. Now, why can't Americans have the same?
Seriously, the voice calls are prioritized first in the networks, and it's practically indifferent to the network operators what the rest of all that already built bandwidth is doing. There shouldn't be lack either, unless if the operator really grossly undersized their networks. The impact around where I live at is zero but the customers get a pretty nice service.
That service is good enough to cover the costs. What is important is that it enables new sorts of (business) concepts for mobile phones and mobile applications. That's where the local operators have their stakes in: things like virtual wallets and such. By not making the data plans itself near free utilities the American operators are in fact stalling innovation. I kind of feel sorry about the lack of vision there. Instead of that the operators choose to pretty much just poop on their future revenues which is baffling to me.
Someone in congress must have wanted to move his iphone to a new carrier. They don't really give a damn about an issue out there in DC unless it effects them personally, or are paid off to care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have no doubt that many in the wireless telecom business would love nothing more than to implement customer-friendly features and services. This is the main thrust of much of what is going on behind the scenes. Tradeshows and conferences feature discussions about how to maximize customer satisfaction through improved customer experiences. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that there is some cabal trying to keep cellphone customers in the dark ages.
However that's not the whole story. The wireless telecoms are descendants of the old wired telecoms. And with that heritage comes all the baggage you would expect. Terrible billing rates, bad customer service, and all the rest. To upend such a situation and return to a customer-centric service/pricing model would require a tremendous amount of investment. That investment cannot be made due to the way the stock market judges the performance of companies based on 3 month periods.
Getting sued for deliberately damaging profits is less profitable than simply sticking with the status-quo. So expect to continue to be screwed over by the phone companies. They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
(or skype). Nah, every man for himself.
The industry response to these charges has been interesting so far. Apparently Pogue got at least one executive at a major carrier's attention long enough for a PR piece to follow that tries to poke holes in some of the complaints...
Mr Pogue, I'd like to introduce you to capitalism. Everything you've described is the nature of the beast.
In Japan the situation is pretty similar, while probably cheaper overall. From a few years back, the trend is the sale of a device for zero yen, while subscribing a 2-years contract. The "zero yen" is actually "You pay xxx yen monthly and, monthly, the carrier reimburses xxx yen" giving a zero-yen illusion (xxx being the actual devicePrice / 24). You may cancel the contract at anytime, but you'll have to pay the xxx * remaining-months (24 - months you paid) yen to the carrier. It is a good way to keep customers for at least 2 years. The iPhone 3G for instance is "free" (2 years contract) since March 2009.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
For example, a couple of weeks ago I began receiving robocalls to my mobile number from some "collection agency." They were obviously looking for someone else so I wasted a couple of minutes of airtime waiting for a human to pick up. After picking up, the twit basically said "we have the right person and you owe us $X" and that the calls would continue. I told them to never call me again and remove my number from their list. Now the robocalls continue at odd hours of the night and morning. When I complained to my carrier (ATT), they basically said "there's nothing we can do about it. BUT if you sign up for this new service for $4.99/month you can block specific numbers." So I complained that they were extorting money out of me to protect me from harassing phone calls. They suggested I complain to the FCC and didn't offer to help at all (other than suggesting yet another monthly fee).
I'd love to just punt ATT, but they offer the best coverage around here. I'm open to suggestions on how to deal with this. ATT wouldn't even agree to block all "unknown/blocked callerID" numbers for me.
Sigh....
"Industries" don't function that way, though individual companies can and do.
GM and Chrysler sold crap, they knew they were selling crap, and their "exit strategy" was to have you and me and everyone else REWARD them for producing crap. Toyota, on the other hand, focused on what their customers wanted - a reliable means of transportaiton.
More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers. Vista was supposed to be "the best Windows ever." That has changed to "We feel your pain - Windows 7 will be the best Windows ever." But no refunds for the millions who ended up stuck with crap. Costomer-focused? Nope - you're just peons to be lied to and raped and your wallets and purses pillaged.
Show me this dream world where whole industries are trying to please their customers. It's still the exception, rather than the rule.
Because we put up with it! If all cellphone service providers are assholes, but we keep signing up with them anyway, whose fault is it? People always tell the beat up girl to leave the abusive boyfriend, but when push comes to shove it's not quite that easy, is it? Either vote with your wallet or shut the fuck up.
'"Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.'"
They've done such an effective job with the airlines.
One wonders to what extent the dominant business model of frantic and very often highly deceptive advertising effectively locks out the theoretical competitor willing to deal fairly with customers. If over here a service offers a very nice handset for a hundred dollars or for nothing after a sneaky rebate that may or may not be paid, "unlimited access" (to the Internet) with many lawyerly caveats that make it way less than unlimited, plus some seemingly large number of talk minutes per month that somehow ends up being rather less and which quietly saddles the heavy user with many extra fees, etc., then how exactly does the theoretical ethical service over there attract (the better class of) customers in all the noise and hand-waving?
Telling potential customers that they will get less and pay more than with advertised plans from competitors, even if they actually get more and pay less, is a hard sell. When everyone else is lying, how do you prove you are not just another sleazy liar? Are there even enough potential customers of the ethical service provider in any given coverage area willing to take their eyes off the shiny new handset long enough to squint suspiciously and intelligently at the fine print?
There must be a few smaller service providers that aren't crooked, scattered throughout the country. I wonder how well they are doing financially.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
They'd rather struggle, apparently. Why offer good/honest service at a good/honest price and keep customers while continuing to attract more, when you can just gouge the ones you have as much as possible? The movie theater industry has the same problem. Good movies or no, more people would go to the movies and buy from the snack stand if they didn't charge $17 for a Snickers and $43 for a popcorn and drink. Lots of people don't like going to the movies simply because the snacks are overpriced. So even if they do go, they don't go to the snack bar. If all these theater owners would wise up and charge reasonable prices for the goods in the snack bar, more people would utilize the service, and more people would go to the movies, and they'd make more money overall, despite making less on one sale. The cell industry is no different. Despite the fact that SMS text messages cost nothing to send, they're quite content to gouge customers for a service that costs them nothing to provide. They gouge for internet data usage. They gouge for MMS. They gouge for airtime. They're electing to remain oblivious to what customers actually say about them, because they claim they're struggling to make it as is. They claim they offer a fair service at a fair price, despite all the facts that prove otherwise. $5 from 1000 people will always be better than $10 from 100 people, but they'll never clue in that growing that 100 people into 1000 people is indeed just as simple as lowering their prices to something sane.
That link should really be in the summary.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This is entirely why Android was developed and is so fundamentally important to the future of our communications. Today, without Android, what we're seeing is the case for network neutrality in the form of ringtone racketeering. Carriers are locking down your cell phone and forcing you to buy music from them. With every passing day we're using our computers less and our cell phones more. The difference between the two is that your carrier has total control over your cell phone while your ISP has no control over your computer. Suppose five years down the road you're still buying phones subsidized by a contract with software loaded onto them by Verizon. These phones end up replacing your desktop because they are now just as powerful. Now every time you want to listen to music, you are forced to suffer through a store worse than iTunes.. and let's even say Verizon forces you to use Bing instead of Google. This is bad for you as a consumer, and this is bad for Google as a content provider.
Enter Android, where the operating system is open and available at no cost for any number of phones and presumably on any number of carriers. Now we see a future where everyone can run the same software on their phone regardless of carrier. Any time one carrier decides to lock down their phone people will quit buying it. It's not viable. Since we're talking about wireless data, it's easy enough to simply switch to another carrier. Now we've forced the telco's into companies that treat you fairly and compete for your business because they will become insolvent if they don't. We end up with network neutrality and control over our own hardware, and we did it organically without the use of government.
Android is not the be-all, end-all phone operating system. However, if successful it will force all other cell phone platforms to provide the same level of freedom through market controls.
How about shareholder lawsuits? Remember, the corporation must do everything in it's power to maintain or improve shareholder value. Of course, ethics is a lower priority.
I know, how about reversing this decision that allows corporations to be persons? Maybe after that, corporations will play nice.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
That is all well and good, but, wireless customers have gotten "use" to the cell phones being "free" or 20-60 dollars, because of the contracts. I would prefer to pay a higher rate for a phone, and pick & choose the carrier to use it on. The USA is WAY behind the rest of the world in the choice of phones they can use. If carrier locks were removed, and just about anyone could sell a phone, the price on high end phones, as well as the throw away phones would, because of competition, come down. The carriers, for obvious reasons, like the subsidy locks, which "lock" you to a certain carrier until the contract runs out. Also, from a management standpoint, I'm sure the carriers would HATE to try to provide customer service to make sure the thousands of different phone types/styles would be compatible with their networks. Too bad, other countries do it. The USA wireless carriers are just lazy. Look at at&t's 3G network. Not enough bandwith to support the people signing up for the iPhone and other high end phones, to use the 3G network, are reduced to "dial up" speed because of overselling the network.
If the carriers thought that their customers really wanted no contract plans, they would compete for that business. As it stands, it is really not hard to get mobile service without contracts. Even pre-pay plans can be quite economical. Unlocked phones are readily available if you are willing to pay for them up front. Unfortunately most people are willing to sell their freedom for $50 off the cost of a phone, so the carriers keep doing it.
Wow. You have rural coverage. Congratulations, guys. How about the fact that you've ADMITTED your business model orbit around fleecing customers by crippling handsets such that everything customers do has to go through your "nation's most reliable network," thereby incurring pay-to-play fees over and over for simple operations that could otherwise take place over WiFi or Bluetooth?
FUCK Verizon. Fuck them right in the ear. Sideways.
+++ATH0
It would take an act of congress, but the other thing is it's a slippery slope, once you get the gov involved, things go downhill faster than they should. The reason it's so uncompetitive is probably the gov involvement in the first place.
That acts of Congress actually work?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I've heard that Cellular South is a really good telecom with wonderful customer service, etc. I've never tried it myself -- their primary coverage doesn't extend north of the Mason-Dixon line.
We only have ourselves to blame. These companies are making billions of dollars because *we continue to give them money*. How did humans ever survive without cell phones?
Outrageous text message rates? THEN DON'T SEND TEXT MESSAGES. It's that simple. If people stopped paying for their crap, their prices would lower and their customer service would get better.
They have no incentive to be competitive or nice, cause they rape us blind with fees and treat us like shit, YET WE KEEP PAYING THEM EVERY MONTH.
Hello. Wake up call. I gave up the monthly cell phone years ago. I keep a pre paid phone for emergencies and that's it. And y'know what, I don't miss it for a second. I actually enjoy the peace and quiet. You don't realize how much of your life is sucked up by this crap until you free yourself.
Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.
Risks, it's all about the risks. How is Congress doing with the health care bill? At the moment, the biggest supporters remaining are the AMA, health insurance companies, and drug companies. Carbon credits? The big supporters at the end included the coal industry.
The cellular corporations are abusive monopolies and a giant, fetid, trust. And if legislation gets anywhere near passage, they'll be the ones writing it.
The reason Larry Lessig got out of the copyright fight is because he realized Congress had to be fixed first, before any progress could be made. Same thing here. Until we disconnect Congress from the grip of lobbyists, it is not possible for good legislation to pass.
I want a solution, badly. I completely understand that the current path is a path toward more unearned wealth concentration. The first, mandatory, step is to break the grip that lobbyists have on D.C. It is the only first step that can lead down a path that is not worse.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How many deaths have been the result of capitalism; of nothing more noble than a rich man wanting to be even richer, and sacrificing the health and lives of millions of workers to achieve this. Don't even try to count how many people capitalism has killed, because not only will you not know where to begin, but also it will never end.
I have a cousin in USA, and last time we talked, she told me that she and her husband pay 120USD per month (total) and they get nice mobile phones and awesome Internet. She compared that to Serbia where she considered mobile rates to be extremely high, since we pay everything by usage. In the worst case, we pay about 0.05 per SMS (only sent one, receiving is free); we pay about 0.20USD per minute of call (receiving call is free); Internet can go up to 0.60USD per MB. But with some extra "packet add-ons" you can lower your SMS price to 0.01USD, calls to 0.01USD for certain numbers and you can get Internet for 0.02USD per MB. And everything is still without any contract, just via buying some coupons on the kiosk (or on ATM, or in bank, post office, via Intenet...).
In my point of view, this is actually a better deal than 60USDx24 months to get a telephone which I can buy for 300USD (and you can always buy it on credit card if you don't have enough cash). Even with worst case scenario here, it would take me quite a calls and SMSs to make bill worth of 24x60-300 = 1140 USD.
Is there a way to get pre-paid number in USA and how much they charge per minute and SMS? Can you buy decent DCMA telephone without contract?
No sig today.
So? Separate out the phone financing. It should have been separate all along. It can share the bill with the service, but you should be able to drop the service part and either buy out the phone or continue the financing deal.
The way they have it now, they get to play "unregulated bank" (like paypal) at usury rates and even worse: when you finish paying off the phone, you still get to pay the subsidy rate as if you were still paying it off! (and no, I don't think $5--$10 off if I sign another 24 month contract is sufficient. I shouldn't have to sign a contract to get the rate I should be getting anyway)
There is definitely a market failure going on here, and while I oppose regulation on principle, something does need to be done to bring back competition or fix the issue. If competition is impossible in this market then regulation is in fact warranted. And the regulation should be onerous enough that the companies prefer the market solution over the regulatory one.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I've just started to get spammed relentlessly with one of the tracphones here. It costs money/airtime to retrieve voicemail messages as well, and the spammers always leave messages. I've only given the number out to a few relatives and like my boss, etc, and still get the spam. sucks. It's still a better alternative to some doofus two year "plan", I just will NOT do this anymore, but it ain't perfect. Cellphones are supposed to be spam free by law, you aren't supposed to have to go register and 'opt out" like with a landline phone, but the stuff continues and joe government appears to be helpless to stop it, despite billyuns in taxes they get.
With that said, I think I am going to a Boost prepaid (same sort of cheap blisterpack phones hanging on the wall at the store) after my tracphone minutes wear out soon. Unlimited more or less everything (voice, messages, data) for 50 bucks a month, OR, more interesting to me, you can just go the dataplan for 35 cents a day (slow connections but at five gigs cap-what they call unlimited, I guess like ATT or Verizon calls "unlimited" so that's a wash, you just won't hit it either most likely unless you go nuts with it) and phone calls are ten cents a minute. With email etc being cheap and easy, I just don't need that much voice anymore, basically I use the phone just to have some limited emergency communication, once in awhile local calls-not too many- and for a few things like authorizing payments with insurance, etc. I try to avoid automatic payments for anything, go month to month only to try and protect my account better.
But ya, in general, prepaid rocks for the ability to just pay small cash upfront and have a phone. I dumped my Verizon account, there just wasn't any point to it anymore. Technology changes too fast to get locked into some TWO YEAR "plan". Today's expensive smartphones will be the cheap blisterpack prepaids in just a year or two, so I can wait. The blisterpack phones now have cameras and crude browsers, you can see them change *monthly* and get better and better.
Electronic gadgets are *cheap* to make now, those smartphones they want hundreds of dollars for? Out to lunch, price gouging people bad, and keeping people locked into their stupid "plans". As long as you can do without the very latest bleeding edge features, prepaid rocks. The more people we can get to switch to prepaid, the quicker these big telcos will get real on their dumb policies and fees.
These days you are encouraged to lock down your AP as much as possible so that Vodafone makes more money. I wish there was something like wifi with about a mile range and affordable AP's
At one time, the stock market was a place where people could invest in companies that they believed were well run, stable, and had products and services that people wanted. Stock was a mid to long term investment.
Now it's treated as little more than casino gambling. It hardly matters if a company actually has a product or not anymore as long as it looks like the stock will go up. Long term stability isn't even a consideration. An "investor"'s wet dream is to buy a big chunk of stock in a company that then burns 100% of it's accumulated good will, cash reserves, and future to raise stock prices. As long as they can sell just before the dead carcass hits the ground.
That's why CEOs like Chainsaw Al Dunlap were Wall Street darlings right up to the point the street realized that Al and company would hide the signs to jump off so they could get THEIR stock sold off at the top.
That's why the internet bubble happened. It's not that astute investors actually believed that mail order pet food was the wave of the future, it's that they believed enough people would buy stock in it (people who believed the same thing they did) that the stock would skyrocket (as it did). Each resolved to sell it off near it's height (mostly to smaller more naive investors) before it dawned on everyone that people buy pet food at the grocery store. Meanwhile, smarter but less flashy small companies with real prospects for the long term couldn't get the time of day from investors. Arguably the few successes from the dot-bomb were companies that had what would traditionally be considered a good investment and were able to wrap it in flashy pie in the sky crapola long enough to get investors.
The more stodgy telecoms are popular investments mainly because they have plenty of momentum to burn in exchange for unsustainably inflated profits. On the corporate side, their big play is to be too ubiquitous for consumers to avoid. You can run to an upstart, but they in turn depend on the old telecoms who will either crush them or beat them down and then buy them up.
The solution is link customer complaints to frequency allocation/revocation. The frequency spectrum belongs to the people and our government leases it out to the carriers. Companies would bend over backwards (and forwards) if their lease was dependent on customer satisfaction. More frequency auctions could also offset some taxes.
The title of this article is redundant.
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
That's delicious irony.
Yeah, this may sound like an astroturf, but it isn't. I have no connection with them, don't even use them (yet).
Cricket started out as a small company offering phone service in a few areas, including mine. They were offering all-you-can-eat no-contract service, cheap, but you had to buy your own phone (or reflash another compatible one). They've done very well since, with their service expanding to most major markets.
At the time I signed up for my last contract, their service was a little iffy, with "network busy" issues; it's improved since then. I'm strongly considering switching to them when my contract is up.
I do believe that if the other companies out there don't switch to a similar business model, Cricket is going to eat their lunch.
I'm not quite sure what it is, but it looks like that there is some government regulation in the US that makes the situation so bad. Compared to what we have in Sweden, the US mobile phone network is abysmal. In the US networks have poor coverage, high prices and long contracts that lock you in to one provider for a long time. If you thing it is geography, think again - Sweden has about the same population density as the US. We have some regions that are relatively densely populated but large parts of the country are not. Yet you can basically go to the point furtherest from civilization and you'll still have full 3G coverage.
Now to my point: Sweden has almost no regulations of the mobile phone market. Although we have a government that is rather regulation-happy, mobile networks and internet providers have been excepted. We have a large number of mobile providers (I would guess something like ten times more mobile providers per capita than the US) so you can pick and choose. Prices are low and coverage and speeds are good. All that is accomplished without any interference from the government (there has been some interference from the EU regarding roaming charges, but that's a different story).
Another example are mobile networks in Africa. Guess which country in Africa has the best and cheapest mobile networks? You probably guessed wrong: It's Somalia. Apparently mobile network companies thrive under anarchy.
So, as it seems to me, less government regulations of mobile networks seems to produce better results for the consumers. The question is what kind of government involvement is making problems in the US? Or is it something else?
When you allow the gov which shouldn't even be allowed to control our airwaves in the first place to sell off the publics airwaves to the 'highest' bidder then you are just asking for corruption and price gouging.
Take back our airwaves people.
Private nonprofit citizen body should allow 'opening' the airwaves to everybody for nonprofit. It can be done but our gov is now so greedy.
Create a system like the internet which allows traffic and allow peoples the public access.
Having Gov frequencies is stupid too.
I bought a phone recently for my son. $50 cash at T-Mobile. No contracts or anything. I then went for the slightly more expensive option of flex-pay. This basically allows me to go month to month and I just let them automatically take out the funds every month(which refunds me the $5 difference).
$50 for a phone(Samsung t239), same price for the plan, and no contract at all. And he gets free incoming and outgoing calls to 5 numbers, which in 95%+ of his calling.
I get two phones for $70 a month with no strings or gimmicks or contracts. My own phone was prepaid and I simply swapped the SIM for a new one that went with the new contract. T-mobile and many carriers allow that. Of course you have to get the prepaid model that CAN work as a real phone or buy a phone outright.
The real problem is people not shopping around for the best deal and not understanding the technology.
(edit - there is a problem with AT&T and the IPhone, I'll admit, but that's going to be fixed in a few months by the look of it)
Thanks, David Pogue. For a while, I thought I was crazy, because I never heard anyone else complain about this. Maybe it bothers me more than others because I've been a technical writer, where I spent a lot of time cutting out bluster and pompous formality.
Wow, thats ironic. When I followed the jump to the NYT article, I see a Verizon ad that I have to click to ignore first.....sigh.
Rather an understatement. Like being a victim of a hit and run accident, being dragged down the street and then left for dead - and calling it irksome......
Sorry, for answering all your questions and killing all the buildup at once. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yes, you can get prepaid here. Phones are $20 to $100, minutes are between $.08-15. Network protocol varies by carrier, there's a mix. Not all carriers serve all areas equally, so you have to chose by where you will be using it the most. SMS I don't use so haven't paid attention to the costs, I think from what I hear though they are mostly a ripoff price, like ten cents apiece or something nasty like that with prepaid.
Don't forget tethering and VOIP restrictions and very low data caps on supposedly all-you-can-eat plans. When I pay for data bits to be transported then I should be able to use those bits in any way I desire -- despite what you want to say it does to your completely outrageous business model!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In large corporations even those at the bottom of the food chain are likely to hear exhortations to consider how to maximize share-holder value.
My reaction to this?
"Customer Service does NOT add to share-holder value THIS QUARTER"... so, instead of bean-counters seeing it as an investment, it is seen as an expense.
Note that Quality Assurance is painted with the same brush, it is an expense and not an investment.
Excellent analysis! Thanks for sending it along...
dp
On 7/24/09 9:51 PM, [Bourdain] wrote:
Dear Mr. Pogue,
I spend a rather inordinate amount of time reading up on the cell phone industry's oligopolistic behaviors and, in particular, how the carriers engage in rather sophisticated albeit subtle price discrimination.
Overall, I agree with your criticisms and identification of more significant issues (I'd imagine that the handset exclusivity issue is a function of congressmen wanting to use iPhones on Verizon) though I'd like you to reconsider one point you made with respect to handset subsidies (full disclosure, I'm an accountant of sorts, by trade)...
"But at some point during the two years, youâ(TM)ll have finished repaying the subsidy."
-->How would you measure that?
I'd argue that point in time is irrelevant and largely immeasurable since carriers charge what the market will bear which is a function of the behavior of market participants.
(There are accounting rules for how the "costs" are allocated, but that's just an accounting convention, not a "business reality".)
Subsidies make up for the financial unsophistication of the typical consumer but are simultaneously a reward to those who are financially responsible (i.e. contractual postpaid users garner a larger subsidy than prepay users). I welcome and take advantage of subsidies because as soon as I'm eligible for an upgrade, I purchase the phone with the highest spread between the resale market value (e.g. eBay) and the upgrade price I'm entitled to (usually netting 150-200 each time in profit). I typically just use and purchase used/secondhand phones since they depreciate very quickly and generally work fine. Since I upgrade and resell at my earliest opportunity, I'm not ceding any special extra profit to my carrier.
Just my 1.5 cents
-D
I mean it, what qualifies him to make such statements? He has a degree in Music. He has written a lot of application books. As far as I can tell, he has never actually worked as a sysadmin, systems engineer, network engineer, etc. Has he ever worked in the telecom industry? In fact, have any of you who are saying how cheap everything should be ever actually worked in the telecom industry and had to support any of the SMS/MMS applications?
How are you coming by your cost estimates? Are you including multiple redundant servers in multiple locations? Having to have enough servers to handle maximum traffic, even if that is four plus times average traffic? Multiple ISP connections over different backbone providers? On-going maintenance and power costs? Regulatory costs imposed by state and federal governments, including Sarbanes-Oxley, such as extra lawyers and accountants and dedicated staff to ensure compliance?
I work in the industry and this is just a small part of what people don't consider when trying to tally costs for "sending txt messages". The systems I work on handle tens of millions of messages on an average day. But, some days, like New Years Eve or Valentine's, we may see a hundred plus of million of message. Because of the SLAs, we have to have the capacity to handle the peak load. After all, you, the subscriber, wants that text message to get there regardless of the traffic load.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Skype is not zero cost. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, using Skype at home you pay for the bandwidth by way of your ISP. Heavy Skype usage would screw over the already overloaded cellular networks and they would lose money on it.
For many contracts the carrier does not MAKE any money until you pay off the subsidy. What used to go into paying off the phone subsidy instead becomes profit, you know, that thing companies try to earn so that they can stay in business, not to mention spend tens of billions of dollars per year upgrading their cellular networks.
Because carriers want people to move to unlimited messaging plans. Holy shit how easy is that to figure out? Why do half size products at the super market cost 70% of the price of the full size product? It isn't all due to packaging, it is to encourage you to buy the larger size package!
I have never seen a US carrier (I haven't looked at pay as you go plans though) that counts checking voice mail against your minutes. I have only examined bills for AT&T and T-Mobile though, so maybe Verizon or Sprint is screwing him here.
Looking at the numbers he links to, that is actually impressively low considering how much more they spend on R&D.
---Asterisk VOIP News
Also
---http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/newsitem.asp?ID=34689
(Emphasis mine)
Now I don't like AT&T. I don't like Verizon. I am pretty meh about Sprint, and I do like T-Mobile's customer service. I think the carriers all do rip people off, saying they should give us free international calling or not make a profit anymore is downright stupid.
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To avoid using minutes to check voicemail, call the phone from a landline, let it go over to voicemail, and then hit * or # (depends on the network) and enter your passcode. It won't cost you any minutes to retrieve your voicemail this way.
Pretty much ALL of the problems with US companies right now (cellphone companies, car companies and many others) are a result of the changes in the last half of the 20th century where investors stopped caring about long term performance and only care about the next quarterly results statement.
is as always government interference:
http://mises.org/story/1662
Now it's treated as little more than casino gambling. It hardly matters if a company actually has a product or not anymore as long as it looks like the stock will go up. Long term stability isn't even a consideration
Too much money entered the stock market, plain and simple. Most stocks are overvalued nowadays if you look at the basic numbers. And if you are wondering which numbers I am talking about. Simple. It is all about dividend yield and expected future dividend yield.
In a sane reality, you would hold stock to get yield. Unless you have a lot of stock in which case you also get some influence. But the whole idea of buying a stock so you can resell it at a higher price is stupid. Because potential buyers should be basing their decisions on the same dividend yield factors as you. The real reason to sell or buy is about the amount of liquidity you have/need and your trust in the future yield prognosis of the specific company.
I think the turn of the stocks becoming a short term gamble, not a multi-year investment started with Daytrading, maybe even here Daytraders.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
If I have to pick one industry dominated by blood-sucking parasites of the lowest order, it'll have to be the big cell phone providers in the US. Someone on my family plan sends me an sms, it costs us 2 X 20c. Once for sending and once for recieving. The minimum "unlimited sms plan" is way more than what I would spend on sms normally so it's not worth it for me to buy that. I can not believe this form of highway robbery is being allowed to go on so rampantly in a purportedly civilized society.
My contract with AT&T will be up in a few weeks and I am switching to Verizon. I had been with AT&T since they were Cingular Wireless and was never very thrilled with their service but the contracts had me locked in and it was never so terrible to get me to go through the hassle to switch.
I recently changed residences and shortly after I settled into my new house I noticed I wasn't receiving text messages or voice mail as promptly as I used to. Turns out my new neighborhood is a giant black hole for AT&T's coverage and most of the time when I sat my phone down it was unable to receive messages or calls. I called to complain only to be told that I had a cell tower "right near my neighborhood." and the best thing they could do was upgrade my phone, for another 2 year extension of my contract of course. No chance in hell.
I had wanted to switch anyway. Most everyone I know is on Verizon and calling them will now be free. I also liked their selection of phones, which were more expensive but actually interested me. If you don't want an iPhone there is no reason to even consider AT&T IMO. People tell me that dealing with Verizon's customer service is a nightmare but it can't be any worse than what I've already dealt with and I've had friends' cellphones at my place and all get great reception.
Why doesn't it occur to them that they'd attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable?
There's more profit in running a horrible, punitive service and spending the bucks to haul in customers, who really don't have any choice about it anyway, because all the other providers are doing exactly the same thing. And the providers are all perfectly happy with that, because margins are high, expectations are low, and the board members are all getting fat bags of cash.
Why change something if it's not broken?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Day trading is the epitome of the problem behavior. Unfortunately, the entire market is geared for it. It started with the brokers. Had they not chosen to play at day trading to extract largish profits on margin, there would have been no drive to make the trades happen in split seconds on realtime systems. Instantaneous spot pricing is entirely unnecessary for a long term investment.
Similar problems exist in the commodities market. It became a casino fiction the moment traders with no ability to even accept delivery of the commodity jumped in. Personally, I would like to see a commodities lotto system where some percentage of trades will actually be forced by law to accept delivery regardless. I can just imagine one of the modern traders as his swimming pool, pots and pans, bathtub, and dog dish are filled with the crude oil he bought for the sole purpose of making some money on arbitrage.
I knew squat about how badly my AT&T cell phone was locked down. Until the day when I installed Google maps and got annoyed that it 1) did not use the built-in GPS on the phone, and 2) continually asked me if it could access the internet. How crippled is that? I looked up how to fix these problem (hooray internet!) and I found some kind person's instructions on how to debrand my W760 phone. I realized that this would also fix several other problems with the phone, such at the limit that ring tones be less than 30 seconds long.
The bottom line is that I had *no clue* that my phone was so crippled by AT&T! My ignorance was stunning. I had avoided buying an iPod because I thought Apple was "insanely controlling," but now realize that AT&T is just as bad.
Here are some of the things that AT&T did:
I'm sure there are other evil things. I'm *much* happier with my phone now, and it will become a much bigger part of my life now that I have "debranded" it. I am still a customer, but I now have no loyalty to a company that would pull that crap on me.
(I am not affiliated in any way with this site which seems to have lots of good information on cell/mobile phone debranding.)
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas