Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"The reality is that more and more of us have more than one wireless device in our lives and are finding it difficult to justify paying for multiple data plans just because we want to own a smartphone (or two), a tablet, and a laptop. You can see the carriers straining to figure out the right way to price data service on Samsung's new Galaxy Tab tablet (the subject of an earlier newsletter); a shared data plan would make it so much easier for someone to buy one and just add it to their existing plan or bump up their plan a tier."

People reading these sites in other parts of the world - namely Asia and Europe - will, right about now, be thinking "Yeah, we already have that - why are you guys in North American so ass backwards?". Well my Asian and European friends, you're entirely right. We are ass backwards. Our wireless carriers here want us to pay a contract fee for every device we connect - I already pay for Internet access once for my home connection, once for my phone, and they want me to pay another fee to connect my laptop - oh, and once to connect a tablet. This is the way things are, though in 2011 the wireless carriers in North American might, MIGHT, get that this is not a customer-friendly approach.

"TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain. Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four."

As a Canadian, I watch the US telco scene closely since it affects me, north of the border. That's why I'm very concerned over developments in text messaging. The New York Times has raised some issues in how wireless carriers are trying to hide just how much they profit from texting. In short, increased text messaging usage does not equate to increased operational costs for the carrier. This means that text messaging is almost all pure profit. In Canada, some carriers even charge for recieving text messages if you don't have a plan. For me, this is very worrisome because wireless carriers are exploiting our ignorance of the technology to make an obscene amount of money. If this continues, it hampers our ability to make full use of useful technology. A line has to be drawn and we have to start standing up by making sure that companies, especially monopolies and oligopolies are held accountable to the government for their practices. Anyone else angered by this abuse? Anyone know what you can do to help reign it in?