Posted on 08/26/2009 8:28:56 AM PDT by MNDude
The FCC is taking a close look at the world of wireless this week, and it won't be difficult to predict what they'll find. With very little effort, the federal probe should come to the conclusion that consumers are consistently taken advantage of by AT&T and the rest of the big providers. The three areas the FCC is discussing—wireless competition, barriers to entry and investment in the marketplace, and consumer billing—could sorely use some reform and oversight.
(Excerpt) Read more at cheapskate.blogs.time.com ...
Get google voice for free or magicjack for 20 bucks a year!Unlimited calling.
Is there any way for the FCC to probe the unbelievable taxes from the fed, state, & local government? Those taxes alone increase my plan by $30.
How much taxes are paid for cell phones? This is the main reason I dumped my land-line. The taxes and fees alone were a third of the bill, and I just had a basic plan.
“Summary: Evil companies making decisions unfair to consumers. Benevolent Government to the rescue. “
Darn straight! It’s about time. I get charged a “fee” to pay my cell phone bill. It cost me $1.50 to go to the cell phone place and give them cash for my cell phone bill. Plus, my one price contract, comes out anywhere from $1.00 to about $5.00 up each month over the contract amount, and even the store manager couldn’t figure out why.
parsy, who says AT&T is far worse than my current provider
I’ve recently been looking at our telephone costs. It is ridiculous how many government fees and taxes are tacked on to telecom line costs.
I’d like to keep the home phone line, especially since the DSL runs over it, in case the cell towers stop working, but the cost is getting to be prohibitive.
And don’t even get me started about Cable/Satellite and the inability to pick just the channels you want to buy...
Oh, so this author wants some more government intervention. He probably wants a welfare plan to give phones to poor folks, which they can eavesdrop and record everything they say, plus have a GPS to keep track of where you go. This author is a fool.
Get google voice for free or magicjack for 20 bucks a year!Unlimited calling
Can you carry that 24/7 on your hip?
You can now get DSL without the phone. Called DSL Direct. If you do this you can still use a telephone option such as that offered by Google or MagicJack or Skype.
I dropped the landline last December. I don’t make many calls and even fewer long distance calls. The costs continued to rise and was at $25 per month.
To call my brother 6 miles away was long distance. By the time the phone company tacked on all their fees and long distance charges, even a 1-minute call outside my area was around $5.00.
I went with a pre-paid cellular with 600 minutes and 1 years of service for $100 (around $9 per month). I also bought a MagicJack ($20 for the instrument and $20 for a year of service).
The combined cellular and MagicJack with free long distance was still less per month than what the landline was. And, I can take the celluar with me.
I work for ATT & our company just wrote a letter to WSJ about Andy Kessler’s “Why AT&T Killed Google Voice” (Opinion, Aug. 19)
Don’t know if WSJ has the professional ethics to publish the ATT letter. Andy Kessler was totally wrong on 4 points he said in his OPINION:
** AT&T played no role in Apple’s decision about Google Voice. Apple did not ask ATT about the matter at any time, nor did ATT offer a view one way or the other.
** AT&T plans to spend between $17 and $18 billion this year to continuously improve our wireless and wireline broadband networks ..... No one is investing more in the vital infrastructure that drives innovation.
** Mr. Kessler is completely off-base on his comments about pricing. America’s wireless customers pay the lowest rates in the industrialized world, with average revenue per minute of just five cents, on average -—(our TAX must be the highest tho )
** AT&T is the leader in smartphones, has a long history of innovation.
self-ping
Oh, how soon we forget.
As I remember the story, less than 3 years ago Apple actually chose AT&T for an exclusive deal on the iPhone. One big reason was that AT&T was willing to make some system changes to allow the iPhone to work better on its network. At that point in time, the iPhone was new & unproven. So At&TT was taking a risk.
Now the iPhone was a big hit from the start, an in other countries more providers were willing to make some changes to accommodate it.
I remember reading the terms of service Apple first put out for applications, and one of the agreements Apple made with AT&T was that applications could not use VOIP over the AT&T network. It seemed to me that this protected AT&T by keeping voice calls at AT&T rates.
Now, I don’t see anything at all wrong with this. Without that agreement AT&T wouldn’t have signed on the the iPhone, and we wouldn’t even have the device. It is the price we all have to pay to reward AT&T’s innovation and forward thinking.
As soon as the government starts mucking with this, it will kill off innovation.
Now that exclusivity isn’t going to last forever, and I expect to see it go away in less than two years, but AT&T has to be able to profit from their decision for a while at least.
Friggin nanny state p*ssies...
You have to have a wireless net connection,computer and your phone and that’s it.I pay nothing for net/tv/phone.
Thanks for sharing what you did.
We’re going to switch the cells to prepaid. My wife’s cell is something like $35/month and she never even turns it on. I’m on the lowest minute plan (an unadvertised level below what’s on the web site) and I still don’t use half of it.
Walmart/Tracfone have a $30 flip phone and a nice family plan. I can by a year’s worth of minutes for both of us, and the phones, for what we pay for 3 months’ service.
I looked at our long distance on the land line. There are fixed costs of something like $8/month. We only made one call last month that qualified (my parents - wife’s parents are “local long distance”), for something like 30 cents. So that one call cost us $8.30! We could have used one of the cell phones for essentially free.
I think the landline is somewhat of a psychological thing - its a “real” phone to me compared to the wireless. If it were affordable, I could allow myself the luxury of thinking that way, and for the convenience. It’s now priced beyond that level.
With MagicJack or Google voice, can you keep your existing land line number or do you get a different number?
MagicJack - you get a new number.
Depending where you live, that number might also have a prefix for a different city. It won’t affect outgoing calls, but it could cause any ‘local’ incoming landline callers to be charged as in-state long distance calls.
If you receive many local calls, it could be a problem — for the callers.
Also, I am not able to modem-fax via the MagicJack. If you fax, that could also be a concern.
Otherwise, for $20 a year with no additional charge for calls through the US and Canada, it is worth the price.
At least with MagicJack you can't port your number. Probably not for Google voice either.
But for the price I really don't care :-)
I tried to get my mom to do it but she's determined to keep her number. I tried to explain to her that it costs her almost $30 a month just to keep that number but she's convinced it would be a problem.
I dropped my landline 5 years ago and went strictly cell. The I picked up Skype, which I'll drop when it's up for renewal, and now MagicJack.
I picked a number that would be easy to remember for people. I really didn't care that the area code I chose was not where I lived, though they were available. So my area code and exchange is 772-882-xxxx for my MagicJack. Really the only folks that call me use either their work phone or their cell. All my friends email, IM or text. :-)
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