WSJ: Americans' Phone Bills Are Going Up 273
There's been some positive news in the last year (and the last few) for American cellphone customers: certainly there's more visible competition for their business among the largest players in the market. Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that while more competition may translate into some more attractive service bundles, flexibility in phone options, or smoother customer service, it doesn't actually mean that the customers are on average reaping one of the benefits that competition might be expected to provide: lower price. Instead, the bills for customers on the major wireless providers have actually gone up, if not dramatically, in recent months — which means U.S. cell service remains much more expensive than it is in many other countries. The article could stand a sidebar on MVNOs and other low-cost options, though -- I switched to one of these from AT&T, and now pay just under $40 for one version of the new normal of unlimited talk and text, plus quite limited (1GB) data, but still using AT&T towers. Has your own cost to talk gone up or down?
Canada... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's still a lot cheaper than Canada. Here we're dreaming of having something as good as American plans! As a single parent I just can't afford what they charge here...
False advertising. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand how businesses are allowed to tack on fees to bills without disclosing these fees in their prices. Somehow they can't quote these fees when you are booking the service, but they can calculate them when billing for the services.
Some years ago, I rented a car from a large airport and one of the fees tacked on was for the property taxes paid on the car. Why don't they just tack on another fee for the property tax on their buildings, or their staff costs, car depreciations? These are all costs that must be paid by the business whether or not I had rented the car -- just like the property taxes on the car.
I am just waiting for prices for cellphone and car rental services to be $1 with the rest of the cost as "taxes and fees".
Bill went down after I threatened to leave (Score:5, Interesting)
My bill with Verizon dropped 40% after I threatened to switch carriers. Cell phone plans are a beautiful example of how prices are set based on the market's willingness to pay, not on the actual cost of the good or service.
Expect prices to continue to rise as companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth from their consumers.
Cheapest Plan (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Bill went down after I threatened to leave (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been ready to split to a MVNO for my two phones, both out of contract and no need to upgrade anytime soon. Even went through unlocking process with ATT. I was getting ready to do it last month but life happened, but I was able to get the website to take my $120 service (unlimited minutes, texts, 1GB data) down to $90. It was the same plan - and irritated me that it didn't just automatically move me. Then I log in today, and they actually have applied another discount without my intervention - now my monthly service is $65. They also seem to be applying my company discount differently - before it used to only be on the phone plan portion of the bill, now it seems to be applying over my entire bill which is bringing it down that low. It's saving me about 7-8 extra bucks calculated this way.
So over two billing cycles my phone bill has dropped by nearly half. And all I did was click a different plan the first month, and this month I didn't do anything at all. Coincidentally, $65 was the price I was finding for the other services I had explored as alternatives. So, I've never had a problem with service (except on a visit to LA once, it was awful - maybe the smog? Lol) and I've gotten the price I was going to get without the hassle of changing anything. I'm going to keep a very close eye on my bill to make sure it doesn't creep up again, but I'm a happy camper all of a sudden.
Re:False advertising. (Score:5, Interesting)
I beat an auto repair shop on an extra fees scam some years ago. Got a quote for a muffler replacement, and used it. After the work, they tacked on this extra $15 fee for "shop materials". That shop materials fee seems to be a common scam in the DFW area. When I objected, they trotted out the tired old justification that everyone does it, it's standard practice, etc. Also tried to claim it was a government requirement. EPA, you know. I pointed out that they had not included this cost on the quote, and they should have. That backed them off, and they dropped that extra charge.
It's relentless. Just because a business is big and well-known is no assurance they won't stoop to outright theft and try to pass it off as necessary or customary. Once had AT&T try to charge me a fee for dropping long distance service while keeping local. A fee for dropping a service? Ridiculous! When I complained to them, they tried to tell me that a particular law said they were allowed to charge this fee, so tough. I told them I didn't give a rats ass what some miserable obscure law said, as they'd doubtless pushed it through with bribes and lobbying, and warned them I would complain to the FCC if they didn't back down. They didn't, so I did. Evidently the complaint worked. AT&T responded by refunding the fee in the interests of "customer relations" while in no way admitting any fault.
The problem of ripoffs and poor service always seems to crop up wherever competition is lacking, and telecomms companies in the US certainly do not have enough competition. Ma Bell was an evil monopolist until their forced breakup in 1984, which it turned out, didn't help much. Today, telecomms in the US are still uncompetitive, price gouging, regulatory capturing, sluggish, backwards scum.
Re:US cellphone service sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Australia I pay $19.99 per month and get $300 worth of cap value to use on everything except international calls, premium rate calls/SMS and international roaming. (3 services I never use)
G'Day, Australian here.
Allow me to explain how this works for our American friends.
For the GP's $20 real Australian dollars he doesn't get $300 real Australian dollars worth of value, what he gets are $300 imaginary dollars. Australian telco's do this to obfuscate the real cost of services. So they can continue to pretend that a single SMS costs $0.25 and one minute of talk time costs $1.50 or data actually costs $0.20 per MB. In reality that cost is less than 1/15th of the advertised cost. The money has no real value in the outside world and is only valid for 30 days (or however long is stipulated by the contract). This way telco's can continue to confound the ACCC and regular consumers and bold faced lie about the true cost of services.
I'm with Telstra who are shamelessly Australia's most expensive telco... but I don't mind. I'm on a pre-paid plan (PAYG) and for $30 real Australian dollars I get $250 imaginary dollars as well as 400 MB of data for 30 days. Phone calls are $0.90 per minute and SMS's are $0.29, but in reality I'm paying $0.06 per minute for voice calls and $0.019 per SMS taking into account that at $2 per MB the data is 45% of my cap. However if Telco's advertised the real cost of services, they wouldn't be able to get away with charging $0.30 per SMS in real Australian dollars when post-paid (contract) customers go over their cap (feel free to Google "Bill Shock" for sensationalist tabloid pieces about this).
This is a far cry from some places where if you have so much as 1 Peso on your account you can send infinite SMS's. However in that land I also swapped towers 3 times walking from one end of my hotel room to the other so I guess there's a trade off. I'm not all that unhappy with Australian prices, it's more the deceptive advertising that I have an issue with.
Re:Republic Wireless, but there are other options (Score:3, Interesting)
For several years now I've been paying $80 per year for 2,000 minutes with Page Plus. I usually have a few hundred minutes left over at the end of the year, and leftover minutes are retained with continuous service. I've been pretty happy.
My friends tell me that once I get a girlfriend, my low phone bills will be history. However, I've been enjoying my cheap phone service and laughing at my friends with girlfriends for years now.