Cell Phone Cost Calculator Killed In Canada 214
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.'"
Frustrating! (Score:0, Interesting)
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!
I'd hate to own a mobile phone in Canada (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 haz Streisand Effect plox? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we find the algorithm of this calculator anywhere and Streisand Effect it?
Some comments on the Norwegian version (Score:5, Interesting)
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..)
Re:Free press (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Price display through laws (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can we haz Streisand Effect plox? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we find the algorithm of this calculator anywhere and Streisand Effect it?
The calculator (as designed) relies on the cellcos to provide and maintain current pricing data. It will only work with the weight of government regulation behind it to force them to do so.
Re:No leaks? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free press (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Some comments on the Norwegian version (Score:3, Interesting)
Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
This is an excellent example of the so-called "Second Best Theorem" in economics, which is a proof that the Frist Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics [wikipedia.org] is completely useless as a policy tool, because an arbitrarily small deviation from ideal premises can result in an arbitrarily large deviation from ideal (Pareto optimal) outcomes.
This means that the claim in the above-liked Wikipedia article that, "The theorem supports a case for non-intervention in ideal conditions: let the markets do the work and the outcome will be Pareto efficient" is utterly irrelevant to the real-world of policy, because ideal conditions are never realized, and ANY deviation from them can produce arbitrarily perverse outcomes (and not on a good way.)
Well-designed markets with entry conditions and regulations designed to deal with empirically known issues with an unregulated market in the same goods are the appropriate tool for achieving something that is as close as possible to Pareto optimal RESULTS. Instead, free-market ideologues, anti-empiricist to the last, insist on looking only at CONDITIONS, and attacking any attempt to examine RESULTS. This lets them game the non-idealities while claiming the purity of theory, whereas in fact they are just a bunch of dishonest, ignorant sociopaths.
Re:Free market (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Frustrating! (Score:3, Interesting)
Today it seems to be more about hands-off domestic corporations, encourage private alternatives to public systems, and alter laws to support home-grown international corporations. The media spins everything into a story and you don't have a story without conflict.
These days, democracy needs to be protected from private interests, and the Conservatives are caving in all the wrong places. I don't like them.
BTW, did you send in your membership to the Pirate Party yet?
Slashdot Surreality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Free market (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Frustrating! (Score:2, Interesting)
And sounds a lot like what was being accomplished by Bush. Unpatriotic was the charge leveled repeatedly. The insane spending was initiated by Bush. The only howls are because a few different groups are getting the payouts and bribes than the Republicans would have given. Many of the payouts are the same under either party. The key to recognize is that the corporations don't care which party is in charge as long as they have been thoroughly bought. In fact, by having 2 and only two parties, the parties can fight over 'issues' and make voting seem important, when the (big) corporations still win. And having small companies die is great for the big corporations because they get them for a song. And it's not stockholders who make out like bandits, it's the actual bandits, CEO's, CFO's and cronies, who have the SEC in their back pocket.
I totally agree, both parties are corrupt, Bush is/was part & parcel to the corruption, and the big corporations have seen this as opportunity to advance their interests. However, the corporations should realize that once the politicians have the power structure in place, they will all be nationalized and the ones in charge now in the boardrooms will be thrown out and the shareholders screwed out of their investments.
I believe that Obama and his minions (not all Democrats or liberals) are intent on taking this to a whole new level and are seeking to radically change the basic structure of this nation to more-resemble that of Venezuela or Cuba, and do it sooner rather than later.
The Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative fighting going on and being egged on in the media and blogs is a distraction, merely a puppet show so the American people don't realize what is coming until it's too late to save the dream of Freedom that drove the Founding Fathers to form this great nation.
Strat
Re:Free market (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free press (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ?
Re:I'd hate to own a mobile phone in Canada (Score:1, Interesting)
I can confirm, Rogers is by far the worst company I have ever dealt with.
I'm a Rogers customer, bought a iPhone. 2 months into my 3 year contract I get a bill stating I used 200mb of BIS service (That's Blackberry service), and charged for it!
I called to *explain* that its impossible for me to even connect to RIM servers using an iPhone (How do I know this? because I worked at RIM for 5 years)
Took forever to try to explain to the *tech* experts on the phone that this wasn't possible.
In the end they said I needed to upgrade my plan to fix it - *uh huh*.
I said fix it or its breach of contract and I'm keeping my iPhone.
They finally caved but its been months of hell.
For the last 5 months I've been overcharged, and each month I have to call it to get them to credit my account.
CRTC needs to look at these clowns...
Re:I'd hate to own a mobile phone in Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
This is BS.
I moved to Canada 18 months ago and got a Rogers SIM card that I just popped into my unlocked european phone and it worked. I eventually changed over to Fido for a better plan (no contract) and bought an unlocked phone, no worries. You can get prepaid SIM cards basically anywhere and they'll never, ever ask for the IMEI.
If you only need a cheap prepaid, I recomment Speakeasy that's sold by 7-11. Credit lasts for 1 year and you can get a nearly free phone if needed.
I do agree that the cell phone market in Canada totally sucks and blows. Bell is hell, I had the misfortune of dealing with them and they're the absolute worst company I've ever dealt with. Rogers is a pain to deal with, but they do deliver on the product in a more satisfactory way than Bell or Telus.
Now there's a thing to take into account: the sheer size of the territory. Canada's HUGE. Maps don't do justice to its immensity, only second to Russia. I would think that installing and maintaining such a huge network to cover such a small population does have a rather high cost... but that's no excuse for the ways those companies gouge us!