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.'"

Comments

Industry Response

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Even simple steps would improve their image

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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....

Re:Impossible

[causality]

You can't legislate somebody or something into being nice.

Sure you can, indirectly. Force them to compete for their business by making "exclusivity contracts" illegal.

Yes, but why stop there? Here's what I'd like to see:

• Eliminate all forms of being locked into a contract. Make all cellphone service a monthly deal like any other utility so that the carrier has to earn your business each month. Y'know, by being competitive.
• Require that customers can use any phone on any network of the same type, regardless of carrier. I.e. any GSM phone on any GSM network and any CDMA phone on any CDMA network.
• Ban all locking down of phones so that transitioning to another network does not require the old carrier's assistance.
• Regard the intentional locking down of cellphone applications as a prosecutable anticompetitive practice. The fines should be at least 120% of any profits made from doing so, as measured by sales of exclusive apps. Of course, the provider of the phone need not support any third-party applications, i.e. Apple would not be expected to support an application that didn't come from their own app store.
• For GSM networks, require that any fees charged for text messaging state on the bill that cell phones continuously transmit the data structures used by SMS whether or not text messages are sent, so the cost for the carrier to provide text messaging is effectively zero. Require that this statement be immediately below or next to the dollar amount and in at least a 12 point font.

THAT would be customer-friendly.