Lies on the phone
One of the biggest and most obvious scams in our daily lives is perpeterated by the telecommunications industry. My phone bill for instance is just over $62 a month. I don’t have a long distance plan but I have all the calling features except for call forwarding and conference calling. I recently received a call from a Bell representative saying that I could have all the calling features (you know the ones I didn’t ask for because I didn’t want or need them), and that my bill would only go up to $65. I explained that I had no need for the extra features and so I would leave things as they were. Then the Bell representative tried to shake me down for the extra money! He claimed that if I took the extra features and paid these couple extra bucks a month that they would guarantee that my bill would not go any higher than $65 for a whole year! When I asked how likely it was that my bill would go that high anyhow, he said that it was “very likely” because prices are always going up.
I’m not a teenager or some American-Idol watching, cheese eating moron! I’ve seen this sort of thing in a movie or two. Pay us the protection money and nothing bad will happen to your family. That’s what this was, albeit on a smaller scale. But when you add this scam to the litany of sketchy billing practises used by big telecom it stacks up to a death of a thousand cuts. What they don’t seem to realize is that they are cutting themselves! Alternatives are here and more are on the horizon. The economic reality of daily life has begun to erode the Stockholm effect (when victims identify with their abuser) that provided the warm fuzzy feeling many of us have for “trusty old Ma Bell”. Ma Bell and Uncle Rogers have been molesting our wallets with impunity for far too long now.
Let me ask you this, if providing the service needed to make a long distance call is so expensive, how can they afford to give you an unlimited long distance plan that will cost you less than if you made the calls without one? Surely they would lose money providing more service for less money? The reality is that it costs them no more money if you talk 50 minutes rather than 15. The truth is that they are intentionally overcharging you for regular service that you don’t pay for if you don’t use it, to make these long distance plans more attractive. The upshot of this is that now you’re on the plan you’re paying for long distance each month, even if you never place a long distance call!
We all get the flyers, great service, low prices, it’s all so attractive! Read the fine print. The price goes up in 3 months, or 6 months, or a year and they’re hoping you won’t notice! I wonder, if it costs so much to provide these services, how can they afford to offer hundreds of thousands of people this lower price for the time specified? You think they are using it as a loss leader? I doubt it! They are still making big profit even at the lower introductory rate, they are just so pig-face greedy that they want even more! I also wonder if companies like Bell get subsidies from the government to pay for things like cable and telephone poles, you know infrastructure! You see our government (here in Canada) decided a few years back that if they were subsidizing the infrastructure with tax payers money it was only fair that other Canadian companies have access to said infrastructure. It was also hoped that the added competition would result in lower fees for Canadians. Could the individual puzzle pieces of this big picture have been spun so much that they don’t appear to fit together anymore? Could it be that the only reason that Bell’s prices remain so high is that not enough of us have opted to go with the cheaper alternatives that are now available. Maybe we all need to do some research and look for new, better, more affordable ways to communicate with each other?
Rogers are no better with their price is never the price billing. On more than one occasion I have broken down and decided to try a Rogers service. I asked the sales person about all the fees, I even said things like “so when the bill comes at the end of the month what will the price will be?,….”. Trouble is that somehow, no matter what the bill is almost always more than what the salesperson told you it would be. When you call to inquire their attitude is “Well of course you have to pay this extra fee, the government makes us charge you for that” or some other such nonsense. Well, maybe it’s not nonsense the government do love their fees and tariffs and things of that nature. However I specifically asked if there were any other fees. I asked point blank for the total amount of my monthly bill. If it’s an unavoidable certainty that this government fee be added why can’t they tell me this up front? Even if I am comparison shopping if everyone has to charge me these fees it shouldn’t effect my decision to go with one provider or another. Honesty on the other hand does.
The final kick in the crotch is that people in Europe are paying about the same for their internet service which is on average more than 10 times faster than what we have here. Four people in Europe can watch a different HD streaming video program at the same time in the same household! But how can this be? It’s because the people in charge of the internet in Europe are mandated to put a certain percentage of their enormous profits into new technology and infrastructure. Here in North America the folks in charge of the internet have made only a minuscule investment into the backbone that enables them to provide our services. The technology we currently use to provide internet for the majority of internet users is 80’s technology that needs to be replaced and/or updated.
The bitter pill has come to pass. Big telecom didn’t make the required investment incrementally as they should have and now, in this poor economy, have found themselves in a situation where they are maxed out in terms of the bandwidth they can provide their customers. This is why Bell and Rogers want to limit the amount of data you can upload and download to so many gigabytes a month. Well, you can get more gigs, if you’re willing to pay more money to get them.
It’s only a matter of time before some beardy, egg-headed genius comes up with a way to link the world with a technology that bounces signals off the atmosphere (in such a way that it repairs the ozone layer) that’s super hyper mega fast, requires little or no infrastructure because it’s wireless and costs the end user $15 a month! I guess Bell and Rogers would rather save up their money to hire lawyers to sue said inventor back into the stone age. Perhaps they feel their money is better spent lobbying the government to prevent such a technology from seeing the light of day. For all I know this sort of thing already exists!
While you’re thinking about that,…think about this! How is it companies like MagicJack can provide 5 years of home telephone service for $69.95? How can they give you ALL the calling features for this same low price including having your voicemail forwarded to your email! Why am I paying over $1000 each year for a service I could get for $100 for the MagicJack device and 5 YEARS OF SERVICE???
Why Indeed.
This is my opinion, what’s yours?
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