30-Jun-2003.
It's been off for a while now. I've been looking for another, but have changed my mind. I will not carry a cell phone and encourage others to do the same, at least until massive changes take place in that industry. Read on to see why.
The biggest reason I left the land of the cell phone is the service contract. [Service? What service?] In my past, each time the contract ran out, the company would mysteriously alter the terms of service. I could either continue use with the modified service, or get a different plan (with a new 1-year or multiple-year contract).
Clark Howard, a well-known consumer advocate with a talk show, has often stated the problems of year-long service contracts. Unfortunately he usually applies them to health clubs and Internet service providers, but not to cell phones. The basic facts he cites about why going month-to-month, not signing service contracts without reading the fine print, not getting caught up in the sales piches (which are frequently different than the contracts), extra fees, and the cost to quit the service, all apply to wireless phones equally well. Why he doesn't keep that same argument for cell phones is beyond me.
That new wireless annual contract includes new features... but it requires the use of a new phone. Not the free phone offer, but the extra $100 for the 'premium' phone. It doesn't matter if I will never use those features, but the things I want are not available on the old plan unless I'm willing to pay extra for them. Sounds like yet another mysterious fluke.
What's that you say? You want to move to another service provider? I'm sorry, but you'll have to buy another phone (or get a new 'free' phone that you will have to replace each year), and get a new phone number. I've tried to use my old phone on a new service. Even when I found several companies that use the exact same model of phones that I have, they absolutely refuse to use it. There is no technical reason, according to the manufacturers. You want to move the phone number between services? Sorry, but to encourage competition between providers you can't do that. Fortunately the courts recently found that there was no reason for them to NOT transfer numbers between services, and that locking customers up for 1-year agreements really didn't help competition. So effective November 24, 2003, you can do it. But if you do it now, expect to have a multi-year contract to sign.
Okay, so you have eventually paid for your phone. And you are paying a monthly service rate for a certain number of minutes. But wait, that's not like a calling card with 1000 minutes to use before 5 years are up, but to use within a single month. The average cost of plans that I have researched are about $0.10 per minute if you use all your minutes. The equivilant phone card is about $0.03 per minute, and you get to use all your minutes. Recently a few wireless companies have offered lots of minutes for a relatively low price. 1000 'anytime' minutes for $40, although it doesn't include many other features that I would like (no-cost roaming, first incoming minute for free, etc.) If you manage to use all that time, it's 4 cents per minute (rounded up), plus a bunch of extras.
Those extras include taxes and fees (which most businesses ignore in sales pitches) Fees are really things that should have been part of the deal, but since the cost is set by the government or some other company, it is marked as a 'fee' and tacked on after negotiations. Normal fees include a 'federal service charges', which very few people actually understand, a forthcoming 'number portability fee' a 911 tax, the 'universal service fund fee', and so on.
But what if you don't want to be billed by the minute, but by 6 second or even 1-second intervals? Well, unless you are a large corporation, you can't do that. (yet) What about pay-per-usage or pre-paid rates? The cost is about $0.25 per minute, or 8 times the cost of long distance with a calling card.
I already *own* several cell phones. They are perfectly functional, were made by the same company, two are the same model and have the same circuit boards, only differing by the sticker showing the serial number and firmware. The companies claim that they won't work with other networks, but since I know how the protocols and hardware work, I know better. Unfortunately, their sales and support staff continue to propogate the lie, probably because they only know what their training meetings told them.
Finally, Text Message Spam. Enough said. A lot of lawyers are looking in to using the junk fax laws, or similar laws for spam or mail and wire fraud, to charge the sender for the spam. But if you have a fax machine, you will still get junk faxes. If you have an email account but spam is illagal, you will still get spam. The only people who will get money from this are the marketing companies (spammers) and the lawyers. I am afraid the only workable solution will be to refuse to get text messaging on cell phones. Of course, since this hits the phone companies right where it hurts the most -- their wallet -- they might actually do something about it. Of course, with my pessimism, the most I expect them to do is charge the spammers more money, and then have three tiers of SMS services to further pad their pockets -- lots of spam (maybe $0.05 per SMS), some spam (maybe $0.25), and no spam ($1.00) with the last option being so expensive because they will actively make the spammers pay money if they slip through.
I expect that by mid 2006 the situation will be cleaned up enough to go back. By that point, enough start-ups will have grabbed the contract-bound customers with good deals, no contract, and the then-opened 'golden handcuff', keeping their old phone number. The giants will be forced to drop their annual contracts in turn for monthly agreements (like traditional phone service), but it will take at least two years.
Even then, I suspect it will be much like the Baby Bells now, in many respects. In one place where I lived, there was one, and only one, phone company. The cost for monthly, residential service was about $35, and any extra service was $6 per month, unless it was federally regulated. When we had friends and family move to other areas, they could get a basic dialtone for $10 per month, and a small fee per minute for local calls (like 2 cents per minute) or $15 for unlimited local calls (the same service as the $35+ through the Monopoly. The same unregulated servics were available, but the prices ranged from $1-$5 per month, rather than everything being $6. In total, their local phone bill, with more extras, cost less than the base bill plus tax in the Monopoly area.
While I expect the nationwide companies to continute to act as monopolies, and continue to charge outragous fees to startups who use their networks for roaming, I can hardly wait to be able to pick and choose my own options, and my own cost, and have it be a fraction of what they are charging now.
My ideal calling plan