You probably hate your cell phone service provider. Most of us do. They do things like require us to buy their plans if we want a specific phone; massively overcharge us for text messages, which cost almost nothing for them to provide; and make us buy a new charger every time we want a new phone. If you’re wondering exactly how badly you’re being screwed, you might be interested in this report (PDF) from Consumers Union and five other non-profits that are arguing for stricter regulation of telecom companies. You may also be interested to know that the people who live in the socialist dystopia called the European Union no longer have the cell phone charger problem. In that regulation-devastated hellscape, the telecom commissioner is pushing for per-second billing, regulators are working to lower roaming fees, and telecoms have agreed to make a universal charger that will work with all phones. Meanwhile, here in the good old US of A, most people pay over $500/year for cell phone coverage—”much more than users in most other developed nations,” according to Consumers Union.
The text messaging situation is especially ridiculous. The money quote from the nonprofits’ report:
[C]onsidering how little data is transferred in an SMS message, at 20 cents per message, consumers pay the equivalent of almost $1,500 per megabyte of data transferred, a rate over seventeen times more expensive than receiving data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Behold the wonders of the unfettered free market!
