Cellphone Wars

Finally - almost 3 months after portability goes into effect, driving thousands of customers to ditch their plans & go shopping for a better deal, the wireless companies are offering real deals for customers. Cell phone pricing is screwed up - seriously. It's a classic case of an industry that started small, and dreamed up a tricky way of getting consumers to pay more than they need to (rather than the 'antiquated' but totally reasonable pay-per-minute approach AT&T took with the telephone). So now they've got a huge industry on their hands, with a significant percentage of the customers *always mad* at the service provider, almost always because of 1) bad service 2) crappy service plans.
I never understand why one maverick doesn't just jettison the whole 'call plan' approach and offer a way that consumers would ask for themselves. Same goes with cable companies - why doesn't an upstart like RCN (which I get in San Francisco instead of Comcast) offer a 'pick you channel' plan? I'm sure people would flock in droves to such sanity.

Posted by thomasgoetz, February 2, 2004 10:16 PM | | TrackBack