Image: Illustration by Brian Taylor
More In This Article
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Lifestyle, establish Fairness, ensure blood pressure Tranquility, provide for the common Text Messager, promote less Outrage and secure Cell phone Service that’s anywhere near as good as it is in Other Countries, do ordain and establish this Cellular Bill of Rights.
Article 1. The Subsidy Repayment must end Sometime.
The carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint) provide to us very inexpensive phones. We love getting a $650 iPhone 4S for $200!
But we get that handsome price only when we agree to a two-year contract. In other words, we’re paying off the real price over two years of payments. The carriers are subsidizing the phones.
Which is a good system. Yet what happens once the subsidy has been repaid? After the two-year period, we’re paying only for the service. Our monthly payment should therefore drop automatically.
Article 2. We need not Voicemail Instructions.
When we leave a voicemail, we hear a greeting—then instructions. “To page this person, press 4. To leave a callback number, press 5. When you have finished recording, you may hang up.”
The carriers say these instructions exist for the benefit of those who have never used voicemail (assuming they exist). The real reason for the instructions is, of course, to eat up our airtime and charge us more money. Verizon alone has 108 million customers. If they reach those infuriating messages twice a business day, they wind up paying Verizon about
$1 billion a year.
Those pointless instructions should be optional.
Article 3. Text Messages being only Data, the Carriers should make them less Expensive.
We can send all the e-mail we want, with no per-message charge—but we’re still paying 20 cents for each text message. At that rate (20 cents per 160 characters), that’s nearly $1,500 a megabyte.
Even if we sign up for unlimited texting, we’re still paying way too much. Text messages should be included with our data plans.
Article 4. The People should decide how to Use the Data they’ve Bought.
We can pay extra for tethering so that a laptop can get online wirelessly using our phone’s data connection. It’s great for anyone not in a Wi-Fi hotspot.
But we’re already paying for a data plan. Why can’t we use the data any way we want? Verizon’s iPad plan has the right idea: you buy the data you need, and you can then tether several devices (via Wi-Fi) to get them online, too. It should work the same way with phone plans.
Article 5. We shall not be Double-Billed.
When a person calls a friend, the carriers charge both of them. A 10-minute call costs 20 minutes. Isn’t that called double billing?
Same thing with text messages. When I send you a text message, we’re each charged for one message. How is that fair? In Europe, only the sender or the recipient pays. That’s fair.
Article 6. International Calls should cost much Less.
The carriers still charge us $2 or $5 a minute to make cell phone calls when we’re out of the country. Hear me now, carrier people, we live in the age of Skype, iChat and Google Talk. We can make free calls from anywhere to anywhere on the Internet. How can you justify $5 a minute?
Listen: last year AT&T and Verizon alone made $14 billion in profits. How about sending us fewer bills for service—and more Bills of Rights?
This article was published in print as "Down with Double Data Fees!"
This article was originally published with the title Down with Double Data Fees!.
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
13 Comments
Add CommentYeah, good luck with them stop double billing and jacking up the hidden fees every month and charging you for every little perk on your service, that is why I went with Walmart's Straight Talk. My smartphone, the best LG on the market, and it cost me $39.00. I pay $45.00 a month for unlimited talk, text, and internet - there are no hidden fees or two year contracts; I do not have four or five different kind of taxes to pay - just a sale tax, and I can call any phone - cell or land line in America with no extra cost, and I have never had to wait 45 minutes listening to a recording if I need tec. assistance, and I have never been throttled down. If Walmart can offer a service like that, then why can't Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T Moble? And all those phones should be unlocked so you can use your iPhone4S with any service you choose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat article. Its amazing how rates for cell phone plans have actually gone up with the main carriers. With time, competition and technology the opposite should be happening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn another note I recently switched from a voice/text plan with verizon that was costing me ~$60/month (2 year contract) to a pay as you go plan with T-mobile that has unlimited text, data and 100 min of voice for $30. It was a no-brainer decision.
What an impassioned cellular bill of rights! Since we can already e-mail others and chat online by the Internet, the hidden fees charging by the carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint, seems to be a kind of cunning to cheat customers. It is unfair that cell-phone users are still charged for double data fees. Once you do not expect to receive a text message from others and unfortunately you really receive one, you pay the data fees inexplicably. It is the time for the carriers to revise their strategies to attract more consumers, down with double data fees and concealing other hidden fees.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUntil our government stops the same tactics, we cannot expect a change. We get taxed on our income and then taxed when we use the same income to purchase goods and services. Our money gets taxed a MINIMUM of twice on everything that we do everyday. But to address the celular situation directly, the United States's internet and wireless systems are pathetic and ancient. Our country is an international embarassment on the tech stage. If we don't attempt to catch up then we deserve to be passed over, on the world stage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd we need a Bill of Rights for us non cellphonies:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArticle 1. We will not be subjected to your rants, whines, romantic pleadings or details of your recent spleenectomy while sitting at an adjacent table in a restaurant or standing behind you in a line at the bank or driver's license window.
Article 2. We will not be endangered as you weave from lane to lane on the freeway, cell glued to ear or in hand as you call your wife to tell her to start the pot roast.
Article 3. We will not be mortified when, during a conversation or tete a tete, you whip out your phone to answer "this important call." If it's that important, what are you doing talking to us?
Article 4: We will not have the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony spoiled by the insistent ring tones of the cell tucked into your purse or jacket pocket, ring tones you seem blissfully unaware of. of.
I believe sending a text message is actually no cost to the carrier as some smart engineer realized that there was enough room for 1500 bytes in the data packet sent to ping the towers. That extra room is used to send messages.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut cost and value are two different things. Apparently SciAm fails to understand that. We pay these rates because we value the service. If you don't like the rates, don't buy. It's that simple.
By the way, the new iPhone has bypassed the carrier when sending text messages to another iPhone. Total cost for me to send a message to the wife's iPhone - zero cents. Apple uses the data plan when sending from iPhone to iPhone. Apple has smart engineers too.
"Text messages should be included with our data plans."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo... what about all of us who don't have data plans? No texting for us? Texting should be cheaper because it's cheaper for the carriers to provide, but we shouldn't be forced to buy internet access to send a text.
Ready to vote Bill Marvel into office right now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese articles are always fun, but...most text messages still ride on the cellular network, not the data network (for now), and the price is what people will pay for the service, not what it costs to provide it. If it was less expensive, there would be more use and less available bandwidth, but with less revenue to pay for upgrading to 4G, which costs a bit. Yes, SA, after the phone is paid off, the carriers make more profit. Not all of your loyal readers find that as objectionable as SA seems to.
The U.S. has an impressive network, but it can never rival other countries that have inherent advantages due to geography and population distribution. There are several U.S. states that-individually-have more miles of fiber optic cable than have been laid in either South Korea or Japan--i.e., it's not about lack of investment. We're large and we've spread out from coast-to-coast with mountains, plains, and political boundaries dividing us; we face far more challenges than almost any other developed nation. Come on gang--price per unit is down, usage is up, lots of good jobs due to infrastructure investment....things aren't all that bad.
David Pogue looks longingly at Europe where only those who orginate mobile calls pay. This conceals an insidious scam where landline users pay a hefty premium when they call a cellphone. Such calls are not usually included in packages, in the UK they cost between about $0.10 and $0.30 per minute. We look longingly at the US model where calling a cellphone number from a landline costs the same as calling another landline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDifficult to disagree with the rest of the article.
Hi:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just want to pint out a fundamental problem with your assumptions: "geography" and "developed nation." China has a geography as complex, if not more so, than the USA. China is also is underdeveloped if one excludes its cities. Yet it has long had a cellular network that beats the pants off the USA. In the days when Americans and Canadians were using pagers (circa 2001), I was astounded while traveling in China that even the poorest farmer had long ditched pagers in favor of cell phones. I could use my cell phone everyplace except the most remote of rural areas. The reason: the Chinese central government mandated that all companies providing cellular and internet communications had to provide service, integrated with other companies, to the entire land mass of China. Without sacrificing communication service to the population, they enhanced nation-wide competition. Whether one likes the Chinese system of government or not, in this case the needs of consumers was served.
To ppppenguin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh my goodness in Europe people pay $.30 to call a cell phone from landline. I wish I had that plan rate. Do you know how much US users pay for a minute of cell phone talk on average? It's actually hard to find, but brief internet search gave the result of a consumer study that an average account pays .... $3.02 per minute. http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2009/0309/cellphone-bills-average-302-per-minute-study-says (albeit actual per person falls between $.50 and $1, the study admits). With the cell phone plan structure and subsidies for the expensive phones $.20 a minute is a blessing. I have many friends in Europe. The same amount of usage as me of both land and cell phone rarely goes above $15, while I pay $60.
And if we are expecting an important call one afternoon, we should... what? Stay at home with the door locked, staring at our phone?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's nothing wrong with going about your life, waiting for something important on your phone. I've been doing a lot of phone interviews for the last couple of months, and that's okay.
If your friend halts EVERY conversation with you to take an "important call," then yes, he is rude. Or you are intolerable to talk to. One of the two.
I would interpret this article to be agreeing with your point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this