Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Obviously its in my best interest if the Phone Company wants to rape me in the ass with my Phone Bills. That's what it said on the TeeVee anyway.
to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general public could make sense out of pricing and fees
OMG competition! Think of the shareholders!
This is where you need free press that attack like a pack of pitbulls and demand to know who ordered the cancellation and why. Nothing teaches politicians honest like public humiliation.
Can we find the algorithm of this calculator anywhere and Streisand Effect it?
You just got troll'd!
I've just moved to Canada and brought my (legally) unlocked iPhone from Australia with me. I have a two year working visa here. Rogers were unhelpful, and said a) they could not let my phone on the network, and b) they could offer me a new iPhone with a three year contract (despite my insistence I'd only be here for two at most, legally). Fido (a Rogers company, of course) were more helpful, offering a month-to-month plan (i.e. no contract) with relatively acceptable rates and allowed me to use my device on the network. Fido++ I avoided any contract at all, though, because there's strong rumour that Bell and Telus are launching a combined GSM network sometime this month (or next) so they can cash in on the iPhone and try and get some roaming dollars when people arrive for the Winter Olympics next year. So competition is soon to arrive, and Canada's mobile telephony options should be much more interesting soon!
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..)
When corporations have the ability to use government policy as a tool to protect their private interests the correct term is not capitalism - it's called fascism.
This is absolutely correct and when it's in the early stages like this, very few people recognize the danger. They don't seem to grasp that this is not a situation that can improve on its own. On its own, it can only get progressively worse and by the time it's immediately and outwardly obvious that they are living in a fascist state, it's often too late for the people to do much of anything about it other than cower and curse their lack of foresight.
From the summary:
The attempt by the cell carriers to halt this project is all the more reason to go through with it. If anything, that should result in additional effort to not only produce the calculator but also to fund a media campaign so everyone knows it is available. The failure to understand this is all that you need to know in order to realize what a bunch of spineless, useless excuses for human beings (they are puppets really) our so-called leaders actually are.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
For those of us in the states, the Citizen Utility Board of Illinois (CUB) already has a calculator similar to this. Just upload a recent bill or two, and it will tell you what the cheapest plan is for you on each of the top carriers. http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/cellphonesaver.html
Here's the ugly truth:
Rogers is a horrible company that will treat you like crap, and generally try to rip you off... they're also the best of the bunch. (Actually, I find Fido, which is owned by Rogers, but technically a separate company is a bit better) Rogers will at least work with you a little sometimes, Bell will wait until you're on a contract, then screw you, then say "oh well, have a nice day". Telus is about the same.
Here's a great example of Bell/Telus customer service; A friend of mine bought a Telus blackberry after her old phone started to die. She had frequently been disconnected for failure to pay her bill, despite the fact that she always paid her bill, so I really don't know why she stayed with Telus, but that's another bag of snakes... back to the point. So this phone has horrible issues. She takes it back to get it exchanged for a working one, which apparently she has to wait 3 weeks+ for. Next phone, more issues, exchange again. Gets HER FIRST BLACKBERRY BACK as a "new" phone. Finally when that one doesn't work, she gets a different model which she has to spend hours on the phone over the course of a week to get them to agree to. Here's the kicker; ~$40 charge every time the phone#/account was switched to a different handset. That's right they charge to switch from your broken handset, to a working one (which in this case was also broken).
And I'd STILL deal w/ Telus before Bell. Everyone's got at least one horror story with any given provider, and they're all a bunch of pricks, but having a lot of experience w/ pretty much all of the carriers here, I can't recommend anyone other than Fido or Rogers. It's a case of picking the least of the evils. Kinda like picking your personal bank. (Which is TD btw, or at least stay the HELL away from CIBC!!!)
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
This sounds like the platform of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Isn't it amazing how "conservative" once meant something like "reluctant to expend governmental resources" and has now come to mean "eager to increase the size and power and involvement of government, but for reasons different from the ones used by those who are called liberals?" Really, that's a neat trick.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yes, because only aspiring dictators use bombastic rhetoric.
Are you really that shallow? Serious. Fucking. Question. Because if you can't tell the difference between that, and what I was talking about, then there's really no point in discussing this with you. For the more perceptive folks who happen to read this thread, this is an educational opportunity. This, folks, is what denial looks like. Its most distinguishing feature is that it immediately dismisses the valid points I raised while making absolutely no effort to refute it, and does so while attempting to appear superior as evidenced by the overall smugness.
There's something even more dangerous than a wannabe dictator or a government that is heading in the wrong direction. That would be the many people with their heads in the sand who want so badly to believe that "it can't happen here" that they create the excuses, dismiss the warning signs, and ridicule the aware to the point that they virtually guarantee that it WILL happen here. If it doesn't happen here, that will be no thanks to these myrmidons.
Folks, this is so simple it's absurd. Government is not a perfect institution, which we know for a fact because there are no perfect institutions. We also know for a fact that no institution lasts forever. Because it is not perfect, and cannot last forever, government has a failure mode. Be it a military dictatorship or a police state, the failure mode of modern Western government is the totalitarian state. In order to share the parent poster's naive attitude, you would have to believe that both of these are true:
God damn it, both of those are false and you know it. You know it even if you won't admit it.
When a corporation can shut down a government Web site because it contains factual information that the corporation does not want people to know, that is one of your early warning signs. Go ahead and make excuses for it and tell me it's perfectly harmless; your reasoning will be limp-wristed and and your justifications will be half-hearted because you know deep down that I am speaking the truth.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein