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Cell Phone Cost Calculator Killed In Canada
inject_hotmail.com writes "Internet and law genius Michael Geist writes about some shenanigans by the cell phone carriers and the Canadian government in his column in The Star. Canadian taxpayers funded a 'Cell Phone Cost Calculator' so that the average person could theoretically wade through the disjointed and incongruent package offerings. The calculator wound up being yanked a couple weeks before launch. Geist suggests that the major cell carriers lobbied the appropriate public officials to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general public could make sense out of pricing and fees. Geist continues, 'Sensing that [Tony] Clement (Industry Minister) was facing pressure to block the calculator, Canadian consumer groups wrote to the minister, urging him to stick with it.' Moving forward, Michael makes a novel suggestion, one that would show an immense level of understanding by the government: 'With public dollars having funded the mothballed project, the government should now consider releasing the calculator's source code and enable other groups to pick up where the OCA (Office of Consumer Affairs) left off.'"
It's not just cell phones. It's cable, internet, phone and long distance plans, dishwashers and other appliances, cars, hydro, banks, investment opportunities. In short, it's life in a capitalist society. It's not so much that we have too much choice; it's that we have too much 'structured' choice (Rogers calls them bundles) wherin you can never get what want, much less what you need. The best you can hope for is that if you have lots of time on your hands, in other words are a full-time consumer, you might find something you can live with for a little bit less than someone you know paid for something similar. Otherwise, and if you happen to be busy, and who isn't in our overworked society, you pay more than you should for something not quite what you want. Yes, that's frustrating!
It seems to be the worst country when it comes to vendor lock-in (firmware branding, sim locking), long contracts, high costs and craptastic prepaid packages. The one GSM network they have there (Rogers) is only GSM by technology, they use IMEI numbers to make sure people are using the right branded device for the data plan they're on. In any country where there is no CDMA that shit wouldn't fly, of course the Gubmint there don't feel like doing anything about it.
Believe it or not things are actually better in the States because in Canada absolutely nobody understands the concept of a SIM card or an unlocked phone. If I ever visit that country I'm taking an Iridium phone because I'd rather pay $1.45 a minute than support those goons.
Besides the sales assistants there have probably been brainwashed to outright refuse to sell any prepaid SIM cards they might have and do all they can to convince you to take out a 36-month contract even after clearly explaining to them you are only staying for two weeks
If they were serious about consumer protection they'd just pass a law that requires full clear standardized disclosure of pricing.
Failure should result in fines that have significant impact on shareholder value and should be grounds for terminating a contract.
Can we find the algorithm of this calculator anywhere and Streisand Effect it?
You just got troll'd!
Since 2002 the "Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority" has had a calculator offering much of the same for the Norwegian market. In addition to mobile phones it also covers telephony and broadband. Basically, all providers are required by law to provide their pricing structures to the authority, so that the services can be compared. For mobile phones this will involve entering your typical number of minutes (to other mobile phones and landlines), text messages, mms messages and kilobytes.
I'm sure someone will moan that this is socialism, since it is a service that could be offered by the market, or that people could do themselves, or that services such as this can never be efficient anyway. There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people), with lots of mountains and a low population density, and strict rules about required coverage by the licensees. Manpower is also extremely expensive, and most workers are members of a union. So, clearly, Norway should have really high prices, right?
Wrong - according to the calculator my mobile phone costs should be about 0,- every month, with a 0,- establishment fee for the contract. (About 100 outgoing text messages, 100 minutes outgoing, and 1mb. No mms messages)
Why is this? It is of course hard to find the "perfect truth", but here are some informed guesses: The market is very regulated, in order to enforce competition. Perhaps the most important (to the consumer) point of this is that you can move your phone number to any other operator, either for free or for some very small cost. While there are only three GSM licensees there are 16 or so "virtual operators", who operate by putting a box inside the switches of the GSM licensees, and basically resell their bandwidth. The authority is also able to punish any collusion between the operators, and to require changes in price structures between the operators.
Clearly, all this (regulated) competition is good for the Norwegian consumer, but is it good for the telecom companies? The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers, so clearly all this competition does something to the companies, which can't be all bad. Telenor used to be a state-owned monopoly, which was well known for being hugely inefficient and slow. In markets where there can only be a limited number of providers (such as bandwidth in the GSM bands) there is no natural encouragement for companies to become more efficient, if you want to make more money it is easy to just add another hidden fee. Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
(The same system was implemented for electrical power providers, but it failed for the banking system - allowing people to move their account numbers between banks was evidently too expensive..)
Unfortunately, most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company, CanWest Global, which has exerted its editorial control over city papers so they match the the political leanings of its owners (first helping the Liberal party, now the Conservatives).
I came here for a good argument
I'm norwegian aswell, we have this calculator ( run by the state ), which works with interwebs and power aswell, and im sure allot of other things i havnt had the need for. You can buy -all- phones without contracts, -tis teh law!-
It may sound a little odd, but in Canada, our public service is wrather a-political. Advancement is merit based throughout the whole thing, and the only political supervision they have is a parrel BOD at the top. One of the reasons this arangement functions is that public servants are responsible for not fucking over politicians. Always be very nice, and don't contradict what the politicans say. They do it for all political parties, and the parties mainly keep their noses out of their bussiness. Some exceptions are made for clearly criminal activities, even then, unless it's particularly egregious, they will leave it to the media to do the digging. Whistleblowing is done mainly for in office. If you spot wasteful spending from your boss, there are (admitedly poor) protections for you to report it up then chain of command.
In exchange for watching the politicians backsides, the beaurocrats are given a non politicized job. If a career beaurocrat makes an unpopular decision, the minister in charge of the department (who has very little to do with it's actual operations) will accept all responsibility in the media and in parliment.
Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory, but it all comes down to profit margins, and general corporate laziness.
And with particular regard to the GP's point that there is stuff available at Best Buy in the US that isn't in Canada, this has mostly to do with a combination of the US having a larger population and a wider income distribution. That means that low-end items that would have a substantial market in the US simply wouldn't get picked up frequently enough in Canada to make it worth going through the added cost of importing them here.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Scott Adams was right : 'Adams introduced the word confusopoly in this book. The word is a combination of confusion and monopoly (or rather oligopoly), defining it as "a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price". Examples of industries in which confusopolies exist (according to Adams) include telephone service, insurance, mortgage loans, banking, and financial services.'
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
There is something surreal about a post putatively defending "consumers" from cell phone companies, when those consumers are being forced at the threat of gunpoint to fund a "cell phone cost calculator," while on the other hand their interactions with cell phone companies are entirely voluntarily.
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Do you inform your opponent in a game of chess that the move which he is about to make is a mistake or do you instead exploit that mistake to win the game?
I have money and want a service or product. They have a service or product and want my money. We should be working together to trade, not engaging in battle. So why should it be a battle that employs deceit? And yes, chess does involve deceit, as it is a battle, and there are specific "feint" moves intended to deceive. But if an industry does it, then we are no longer in a free market. A free market requires informed customers. And if the companies work to keep the customers uninformed, they are anti-capitalistic. Well, that and most companies also work to increase barriers to entry (grandfathering themselves, of course) which is also anti-capitalistic. The only time a large corporation claims to be capitalistic is when some regulation they don't want is proposed.
But you hit on a point. Corporations often think of it as a battle. Not to battle with their competitor to create the best product so that the informed customers will select it, as capitalism is supposed to work, but against their customers to harm them to the greatest extent they can get away with by giving them the cheapest product at the greatest price.
Learn to love Alaska
They think of it as a battle, because that's how society has dressed it up for centuries. "us vs them" is a very seductive packaging for any idea.
Now if only people could realize that we spend most of our lives talking about, worrying about and being slaves to money, well then maybe they'd find a way to write money out of the equation and we could go back to fucking like rabbits.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
However, if you read a headline which says "U.N. sanctions $NATION" it's assumed that $NATION was punished in some way.
That has less to do with the word "sanction" and more to do with the U.N., which never does anything good in the world, so whenever they appear in the news, we assume it's bad news.
Perhaps a more familiar term for these corporate conspiracies would be "cartel", or did I attend the only high school that taught what a cartel is and why they're evil ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com