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HOME TOPICS SEARCH ABOUT ME Cellular phones are wonderful, but the pricing policies of cellular phone companies leave a lot to be desired. It's time these companies stopped charging for calls someone else makes to your phone. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Time for the cellular industry to wake upBy Al Fasoldt Copyright © 1990, The Syracuse Newspapers It's time for the cellular telephone industry to grow up. We're past the gee-whiz stage. We're not impressed any more by telephones that you can put in a briefcase or install in your car. They're nice, and that's that. Technology like that is impressive the first few times you see it, and then it's like the Franklin stove. Sure, it heats up the room, but so what? What we need now is telephones that we can afford. The people who sell portable phones say they're stuck with the chicken-and-egg syndrome. If you want an egg, you've got to have a chicken. OK, where do you get the chicken from? Find an egg and hatch it. If you want cheaper cellular phones, they say, we need more customers. Then you we can make the cost of each phone less. And, they say, in order to get more customers, we have to entice them with cheaper phone service -- which we can't do because we don't have enough customers to make cheaper service profitable for us. It almost makes sense. Unit prices always come down when thousands or millions are sold instead of hundreds. But there's this little problem with the way cellular companies do business. It leaves me wondering how serious they are about attracting new customers. It has to do with the way they collect their fees on calls. Of course, they charge you for every call you make. And they charge you for every minute (or even every second) you are chatting away in every call you make. That makes sense. But they also charge you for every call someone else makes to your phone. And that makes no sense at all. In my little dictionary of telephone terms, that's a collect call. I call you, and you pay. If you're thinking about buying a cellular phone, keep that in mind. No matter how cheap the phone itself is, every call is a collect call. Would I pay for a service like that? No, you bet I wouldn't. It's not a service. Others agree. By the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. They're staying away from cellular phones. They can buy a cellular phone for the same price as a CD player, maybe $300 or so. But nickel-and-dollar them to death over calls someone else makes to their line? Forget it. The sooner the cellular industry wakes up, the better. In Cleveland, it's already happening. Cellular customers there may now choose a phone company that charges them only for the calls they make. Progress? No, not really. It's just something that should have happened a long time ago. That's not progress. It's justice. And it's something that should happen all over the country. If it doesn't, you'll know who's to blame. |