IT’S NOT USUAL FOR a reporter to ignore a story on his beat, but it’s happening right now for me.
The issue is text message fees and the decision by Bell Canada and Telus to begin charging customers who aren’t on any sort of texting or data plan 15-cents for each of their incoming text messages.
I’ve been lax in my coverage of this story because I find the stupidity at all levels of this issue is breathtaking. Maddening. Press, consumers, government and the companies themselves; there is more than enough foolishness to go around.
When the story first broke on a blog or newsgroup somewhere, and grew from that, it was erroneously reported in other places online and in traditional media that all incoming texts on the Bell and Telus networks would be subject to a 15-cent charge. The online traffic was white hot. Cash grab! Crazy! How can they do this!
When the companies corrected that false assumption and told reporters that it would only apply to a few thousand customers who are not on any sort of data plan, there was a short ebb in the angry rhetoric. That was until Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice, spotting easy political points to be scored with the masses, clumsily waded in and called Bell Canada CEO George Cope and Telus chief Darren Entwistle on the carpet, telling some reporters that his family uses text messaging to stay in touch and these new fees must be explained at the highest levels.
(Er, isn’t it an abuse of power to tell your teenager that “daddy will fix this” and call the CEOs of a pair of multi-billion-dollar corporations in for a chat?)
Besides, given the fact he’s the freakin’ Industry Minister, my guess is he and his family has a data plan and will be unaffected by this change in the policies of Bell and Telus or whatever provider he uses.
Then last week he came out of a caucus meeting on Parliament Hill saying he had met with Cope and made vague references to reporters about his ministry being in charge of regulating the telecom industry and how the telcos knew that (Ed note: What a news flash!!).
The fact that a lead government minister would wade into an issue that is essentially a private matter between the telcos and their customers is outrageous. Customers who are that offended by the new rates (Bell starts on August 8th, Telus on the 24th) can make their own choices about what to do, from taking their number over to Rogers or Virgin or one of the other brands (all of whom have wisely stayed out of this), or they can buy into a data plan with Bell and Telus.
And the other major complaint about the new fees, that of the horrors of text spam is just one giant canard that the press just won’t let go of. Text spam is barely an issue. Rare is the single piece of text spam that sneaks through to a customer’s mobile handset. These are closed networks after all and very well protected from such things. And both companies have said repeatedly that no customer will be charged for any text-spam received.
On a personal note, I’ve had a cell phone for almost a decade and a smart phone for four years and I’ve never, not once, gotten a text spam. No one that I know whom I’ve asked reports ever receiving one.
But the foolishness doesn’t stop with government and the consumer press and bloggers and other assorted online lurkers and lunkheads.
Bell and Telus have much to answer for, too. They claim the number of people affected by this new charge will be small. And in print, it’s been claimed that this is partly a network traffic issue, too (as if texting and not video or other multimedia is the real culprit behind bandwidth bottlenecks).
If the number of people this affects is small, how can it be that much of an impact on network traffic? It can’t be both. And if it really is a small number of customers, why drag your brand through such thick muck for such seemingly little payoff?
Worse, spokespeople for both companies have said that charging 15-cents for incoming texts only brings Bell and Telus in line with other wireless firms who charge even more in some countries. That, of course, translates into: “We’re gouging you because everyone else is everywhere else, but at least we’re not gouging you quite as much.”
Yeah, THAT’s customer service…
Either the companies have done a poor job getting across the message that signing up for a data plan rather than paying 15-cents per message (not to mention the fee they pay for sending messages when they aren’t in a plan) will save customers money in the long term, or reporters and bloggers covering the story are remaining willfully stupid and pandering to the angry side of the issue.
What it really looks like, is a contract issue. Bell and Telus want these thousands of customers (they won’t say how many) tied into a contract – or gone. They want the fee to push these penny-pinching customers (since most of these no-data-plan customers are presumed to be low ARPU ones) into a contract – one that will still be in effect when new wireless entrants and their ultra-low retail rates hit the market in 2009.
Either that or they want them to go and take their few-dollars-a-month-no-contract-selves somewhere else.
I’m not even going to get into the class action lawsuit launched in Quebec over the texting fees, but I am thinking of launching my own class action lawsuit because the subscription rate on my Sports Illustrated for Kids is going up…
It’s business is all this is. Rate increases of any kind will always make people unhappy. Prentice should know that – and that it’s none of his business.
