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The Ridiculous Tech Fees You're Still Paying
Esther Schindler writes "None of us like to spend money (except on shiny new toys). But even we curmudgeons can understand that companies need to charge for things that cost them money; and profit-making is at the heart of our economy. Still, several charges appear on our bills that can drive even the most complacent techie into a screaming fit. How did this advertised price turn into that much on the final bill? Why are they charging for it in the first place? Herewith, fees that make no sense at all — and yet we still fork over money for them. For example: 'While Internet access is free in coffee shops, some public transit, and even campsites, as of 2009 15% of hotels charged guests for the privilege of checking their e-mail and catching up on watching cat videos. Oddly, budget and midscale hotel chains are more likely to offer free Wi-Fi, while luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'"
Internet costs in Australia. Its not uncommon to pay around $70/month for ADSL 1 speeds (1.5Mbps).
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
Seriously? That's 4 years ago. That's a lifetime in the industry
Aww snap! $250 cell phone bill from overages in data usage.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'
The company is paying for that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What about ebooks at the same price as the content but with making a big stock with expected losses, stocking, transporting, the physical media (paper, ink, printing, human labor) and all the chains of intermediaries with their corresponding profits? What about the same, but for music? What about movies, where you also must count too the big chunk that takes each theater?
>Oddly, budget and midscale hotel chains are more likely to offer free Wi-Fi, while luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.
Not odd in the slightest -- the majority of said "luxurious" hotel rooms are being consumed by (in no particular order) #1 the price insensitive and #2 business travelers (arguably a great overlap, if not outright subset, of group #1).
Few of either group in covering a hotel bill for a few nights in San Francisco are going to care much if it's $845 or $885 with Internet.
Finally, those in group #2 are much more likely to have elite status with the hotel, which typically (at the higher levels) includes free internet -- making it a "valuable" perk for your brand loyalty...
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There is no try at jedinite.com
I recently almost renewed my contract with Verizon (business plan @~$110/mo after fees and taxes). But Verizon Wireless tried to charge me for an "Upgrade fee". They wanted $30 just for upgrading my device (and re-subbing my contract). This is on top of the normal price of the phone and 2/year contract. So I left for T-Mobile instead and the coverage has been very good and LTE speeds even faster (suburban northeast USA).
Agreed with the rest of the article too, but I cant remember a time when I had to pay a to check my bank balance. That's either an illegal fee or the author needs to switch banks desperately. (preferably to a credit Union).
Tethering...is possibly the most ridiculous of fees though.
Companies want to sell their products at the highest price each consumer will pay. By charging large fees for convenience items they are able to extract more money from people who place a higher value on their own time.
So, you could save money getting a SIM card for your phone to use internationally, but that would take time and make it more difficult for people to contact you. You could go to the hotel lobby for internet, but using the internet in your hotel room saves time.
This has the perverse effect that it may make sense for companies to spend extra money to waste your time or to provide worse service, if it pushes you to one of their higher priced services - assuming of course that they don't push you to a competitor.
Its just one of the very annoying effects of the free market. If you want to feel good about it, think if it as a "tax" on the wealthy who are able to put a higher value on their own time.
Their last example - payroll cards with fees ought to be outright illegal. IMO.
In my experience these things improve rapidly, last year I was in a Best Western in Aberdeen Scotland and they had some outrageous price like 15 pounds, for 24 hrs. of access, on check out I complained and they gave it to me for the price of a 1 hr. ticket, 5 pounds.
This year it's for 'free', or in other words; included in the room price.
Virtually all restaurants now have free internet.
During the last few years the UK was really expensive, at a time that most hotels in The Netherlands already offered net access for free.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Again the real big businesses get into large contracts with the hotel chains and they get a different rate. But then the hotels get smart and add "service" fees. And the next round of contract talks things get negotiated. The cycle goes on.
In all our travel, if there is no free parking, free breakfast and free wi-fi, I am not even looking at the hotel. They get filtered out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Verizon wanted to charge me a $30 "upgrade" fee when I tried to upgrade to a new iPhone. They're already charging me $200 for the phone and $80/month for the service (plus a new two year contract to replace my recently lapsed one). That means I'm already going to be paying them $2,120. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal for them, what possible expense could this upgrade fee cover?
Why pay? Connect to their access point and tunnel all of your traffic over DNS or ICMP. The firewalls that they use rarely block ICMP and almost never block UDP port 53. All you need is to have a client installed on your machine and run a server out on the interwebs somewhere that is running the right server software and acts as a proxy. The tech to do this has been around for quite a while, and most linux distros have the clients and servers in their repositories. The main system used for DNS is called iodine and there are two different, very good ICMP tunnels that I know of. One is here and another here. If you search through your favorite linux or BSD distro's repository search for "ip over icmp" or "ip over dns" and you'll find what you need.
The only one that's ripping me off right now is AT&T, and that's only because Comcast would screw me harder. All I'm buying from them is DSL and I'm paying $47 a month. Meanwhile on my phone I not only get unlimited internet* (with email from my 10 year old address, YouTube, Google), but a phone with long distance, voicemail, 411, roaming, all unlimited and included in the $42 I pay them. I'm not going to name them but they're not the only ones and some may even be better. I've been with them for 5 years with no problems except their website is an ugly clusterfuck, but most are these days.
Hell, even my credit card company doesn't screw me over, and I'll bet most of you the people you guys deal with don't screw you, either. But you're nerds, and we're not normal (at least I'm not). I use a small local bank, and they're damned near free. Wasting your money is stupid.
But most people? Hell, I'll tell people what I'm paying for my phone when they're paying three times that for less stuff, and they go on using the expensive carrier they're with. And switching carriers is easy; maybe expensive if you're on a contract but easy.
Why in the hell am I paying seven dollars more for internet alone than a phone WITH internet?? I guess because there's competition in the cell phone business. I wish my phone company sold internet.
* I listen to KSHE on it all day long at work, that's eight hours a day using its radio, plus when I ask it the temperature or read a novel or newspaper
Free Martian Whores!
That's amusing. The original name of that motel chain was 'Six Dollars A Day'. Really.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
My uncle was the first person we knew to have touch-tone service, back in the 1960s. I think there was a $1.50/month charge for it. By the time my folks got their first touch-tone phone in the early '80s touch-tone service was free. In 1997 Glenn's partner looked over the phone bill and found that they were still getting charged the $1.50/month fee.
Up until the late 1960s you didn't own your phone, you leased it from Ma Bell. When I worked in a bank trust department in the early 1990s we paid a lot of our customers' bills for them, and I was shocked to see that many of them were STILL leasing their phone from the phone company. In one case at least I knew that the phone had been thrown out when it broke two decades before.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
And you have a landline ... because?
Try and get an ADSL service without a copper cable. In Australia the majority of ADSL services are bundled with a plain old telephone service (POTS, pricing is fixed so that a naked wire is just as expensive but with fewer service guarantees). That, of course, does not make using the POTS mandatory. VOIP works just fine at fixed cost-per-call nationally and far-cheaper-than-traditional rates internationally.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
> Touch-tone, that new-fangled tech from the 1970s...
Touch-tone has been around since 1962 - over half a century ago.
http://laughingsquid.com/century-21-calling-the-introduction-of-the-touch-tone-phone-1962/
TFS says:
profit-making is at the heart of our economy
That is true for SMB, and that was true for megacorporations in the last centuries. Now when transnational companies make profits, the money never goes back to the real economy because there is not enough demand: who want to invest when the new products and services will not have customers? Instead, money goes to speculation, inflate bubbles, and when bubble burst, that wrecks the economy even further.
I got really fed up with paying high prices for soda pop.
The 2 and 3 liter plastic bottles soda pop comes in make handy carbonation vessels. I drilled a hole in the cap and inserted one of those bolt-in-place stainless steel tire stems sold at Pep Boys. I also got a 20 pound CO2 tank at a garage sale, and a decent 100 PSI adjustable regulator from a surplus house.
I fill my bottle to the brim with water. Refrigerate it. Warm water will not carbonate... cold water will. Then I connect my special cap and hook it to 70PSI CO2 ( Do not connect to tank directly, as tank pressures run from 500 psi on a cold day to over 1000 psi on a hot day; the CO2 inside the tank is a liquid ).
I shake for a few seconds and watch the gas stream into the water. About 10-15 seconds or so. After that things taper off. I shut off the gas and disconnect the hose. I take my container full of freshly carbonated water into the house to mix with any variety of flavor powders or fruit juice concentrates.
Makes great fizzy soda pop. It cost me $14 to get the 20 pounds of CO2. I have been using the same tank for about 3 years now. My calculations show I have roughly enough CO2 to carbonate a swimming pool full of water. Its gonna take me quite some time to drink that much.
The one caveat is you do not want any substantial volume of gas in your carbonation vessel, as the compressed gas will release substantial mechanical energy in the event of a rupture of the vessel. The water does not compress, so the idea is to minimize the amount of explosive decompression you get in the event the bottle ruptures - albeit I have not ever had that happen.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I found the best place for WiFi in Las Vegas was the municipal public library. You need to go out of your way to find it, but the librarians were pretty decent about helping you get hooked up if you were courteous and reasonable. It sure as hell beat trying to jerk around with the hotel management and the bandwidth was a hell of a lot better too. If you wanted to even bother, all you need to do is sit in you (presumably rental) car with your laptop or go inside and they even had outlets... or you could get onto terminals in the library.
An added bonus by bringing your own equipment is that you essentially had no real time limit either.
By far and away the worst places were the resort hotels, but even the budget motels are a pain in the rear.
Don't even get me started with "roaming fees" for cell phones. Las Vegas is a death trap for most cell phone carriers. I purposely bought a throw-away cell phone at Wal-Mart with pre-paid minutes explicitly for calling from Vegas on the last time I was there. A buddy of mine brought in an AT&T cell phone, and ended up with a $500 cell phone bill before he left after just a few days in that city. His typical cell phone bill was usually about $40/month. Reno is almost as bad as Vegas too. By using the throw away cell phone, I only had to pay $50, including the brand-new cell phone and I even had minutes left over after the trip. It is just one of those "buyer beware" kind of things.
Meanwhile, in Romania, of all places, a provider (RDS) announced deployment of a new "pipe" (fiber-optic) that would allow (they say) up to 1 GB/sec down, all that for around 10..12 euro/mo, which is the cost of a one-person lunch in a mid-scale restaurant in town. I currently have about 40Mb/sec and pay 23 euro/mo for the whole package (internet, 70 channnels IPTV, and landline phone). In other words, if the situation is this bad in Australia, as per previous posts... it clearly is a huge money grab.
What could've been a good article is, unfortunately, just your typical uninformed zero-research blog rant.
What's missing is what journalism is all about: Going deeper, finding the causes, even if they are more then one step away.
For example, why do some hotels charge for Internet and others don't? No, it's not the price, that is counterintuitive (cheap hotels often offer free Internet, expensive ones charge, as the article also says). So what is it? Well, other articles on the topic that did some actual research dug up the answer years ago: It's not the price, it's the guests. Hotels that are largely frequented by business travellers will charge, because a) their guests really need Internet and b) are ready to pay for it because it's business expenses anyways. Hotels that are largely frequented by tourists offer free-of-charge, because their customers would probably go to a nearby Starbucks instead if they charged and Internet or not may be the deciding factor between this hotel or the other one down the road as in the low price range there are fewer actual differences between the hotels.
If stuff like that had been in the article for the other 4 items as well, it would've been a good read.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hell, even my credit card company doesn't screw me over
Or you don't notice. Remember that money is not the only thing they can screw you with.
For example, I'm getting more and more angry every time YouTube tries to convince me to use my real name, and it never goes away. The best you get out of it is "ok, we'll ask you again later". No, you stupid piece of crap, I want you to accept my answer once and for all, period.
But, Google wants your personal data, because that is what they are selling to their customers (which isn't you, you're the product). So they keep insisting as much as they can get away with. Because my account data with my real name on it would be more valuable then without.
Some companies screw you on service fees, some on quality, some on customer service - but they all screw you somewhere.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While Internet access is free in coffee shops, some public transit, and even campsites, as of 2009 15% of hotels charged guests for the privilege of checking their e-mail and catching up on watching cat videos. Oddly, budget and midscale hotel chains are more likely to offer free Wi-Fi, while luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.
It's all about charging what you think you can get. Budget hotels house budget travelers who likely won't pay extra for WiFi. So free WiFi serves to differentiate you from you competitors, or at least keeps you competitive. Higher end hotels serve a wealthier clientele who won't notice $30 tacked on to a $1000 bill, or business travelers who will just pay it and expense it.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)