I regularly get "special offers" inviting me to take up a, usually, 3 month special introductory rate for a wireless or cable or internet service.
What these offers never state is what the base rate is that you default to at the end of the introductory period. When done by phone, the salesperson nevers seems to know this rate, and it is never on mail offers. It generally seems unfindable on company web sites also.
It is a source of never ending surprise, to the salespeople, that I will not sign up for these offers, because, y'know, they really are bargains. They typically involved 1-2 year contracts with substantial early termination penalties. Why I want to know the actual rate I'd be paying for most of the offer period is incomprehensible.
The really annoying thing is that I would, right now, quite like to change my phone and cable service. Ideally I would like a bundle package, of the type that the companies drool to sell me, where I get digital cable (BBC America a must) with broadband access, and if they can bundle me a landline and small wireless package, well, that would simplify my life.
But, while the company web sites will offer to sign me up for bundles, immediately, I can not get a binding rate quote for the bundles on the web sites.
I can get rate quotes on their "standard" plans, with no insane special offers, but when I add the cost of bundling the plans, they cost more than my current hodge podge of service from several different companies.
Calling sales representatives is not only worse than useless, one has to parse every word, because based on past experience in you say "yes" or "ok" just once during the entire conversation they will "slam" you and switch your service without your actual agreement. And as with cold calling, the people you can call do not actuall have prices for the products they are allegedly selling.
This is completely insane: I want to give these companies my money, realistically at least a couple of thousand dollars over the next two years, and I am interested in the packaging that they by all accounts desperately want to sell me, but they are incapable of actually giving me a binding quote for the cost of the services.
As for comparison shopping, don't make me laugh.
It is almost as if the telecom companies don't care whether they actually receive money from individual residential customers. As if their profit centers are now something entirely different and actual distributed telecom service is irrelevant.
Oh, and while I can "edit" my current plans on-line, I can only add; if I hit the "delete feature" or "change plan" button, I get bounced to a "can't do that on-line, please call customer service" web page. Where they will switch me, but can not actually show me the new plan in writing in front of me, which would be trivial on-line, in order for me to see if the new plan would be better suited to me or cost effective.
Strange.
My current inclination is to cut the bastards off. If they can't actually do business with me, why should I let them have any of my money.
Cutting off cable is very tempting, only the Daily Show and the kids are keeping me on it right now. Similarly I could almost cut off landline access were it not for the rare but very important international call (which is prohibitively expensive on cell).
The cell companies are the worst, but with my current life structure we need the cell the most - which is weird, because for a long time we didn't need it at all.
The US really has the worst and most consumer unfriendly communication industry infrastructure in the developed world. And it didn't use to be that way.
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FYI: the daily show is entirely available at the comedy central website. in irritating chunks with repetitive advertising, but there nonetheless.
We kind of fell into getting rid of cable/satallite TV. We got an HD tv that I hooked up to the unused antenna that was still in our attic and it works beautifully. We get various incarnations of the major networks, 6 PBS stations and some random smaller networks. The plan was to hook up the HDTV to cable later on. 4 months later we hadn't done it yet and we hadn't watched but a handful of things on the other TV.
The clincher was when we realized that if we just bought everything that we wanted to watch from iTunes at $2 a pop and watched the rest over the air we would easily be money ahead. So, we let it go.
Now as for my internet connection, I would give up running water first!
The situation you describe is the result of what is called a free market in the US. Our free market gets us worse services and products in a number of areas than other countries get.
Drop the landline and get a Grand Central phone number in your area code - http://www.grandcentral.com/ - then use it. You can have your cell number forwarded in and out to that number and dial your long distance from your cell using that number instead of your cell - save money. Or get Skype and ket an inbound number along with a Skype handset that you plug into your cable router - or get a Skype enabled cell phone.
Beware of Verizon's FiOS as well -- once they move you to fiber optic, they rip out the old copper lines, making any future switching of service providers rather difficult.
Cite:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR20070…
Thanks for the tip on the Verizon FIOS...
I'll be checking these options out.
The annoying thing about all of this is first that the telecons and cable companies are trying to force asymmetric information processes onto the buyers - they want to sell pre-packaged bundles without even revealing the price of the package, or they have fixed price packages but don't provide the information on what is actually provided.
Infuriating, and subverts the free market since comparison shopping is precluded.
The other trick up their sleeve is that they effectively impose a high transaction cost.
The mechanism is there for efficient transactions but they deliberately cripple it, I can only do the transactions that favour them efficiently, anything else they put time and effort barriers on - they are relying on consumer inertia to rip people off.
If the companies wanted to optimise their customer base, they would provide for efficient transactions, but they don't want to do that - their profit centers are the federal and business deals they have; the customers are just there to fill the connectivity of their network, not because they particularly want the revenue, except in so far as they can bundle high margin poor deals to us suckers.
There's a Nobel prize in econ in this somewhere... ;-)
Two things -- one I've blogged about, and one I haven't but intend to at some point.
Thing #1 -- Because of the lack of sanity in the local market, I can't get rid of Comcast for internet service. DSL apparently isn't available in my neighborhood (I'm roughly a mile or so off of Atherton Street), Verizon doesn't have FiOS here yet (copper or no copper, I can't even get it if I wanted to), D&E cable is only available in the Boro, and Getwireless can't get a site line to their towers from my house. So I'm stuck. Comcast charges you $60 a month if you have cable internet without TV, so even though I switched to DirecTV for TV, it is cheaper to pay Comcast for their cheapest cable TV service with internet than just internet alone, so I'm getting cable TV service I'm not even using. If any company moves in to State College and offers decent broadband service of any flavor for something like $30 or $40 a month I would sign up instantaneously.
Thing #2 -- I logged in to Verizon's website to back down my service to save some money (I suspected I could save on my landline, but didn't want to fight with some clueless phone rep, so put it off). I went in and chose "change service", and chose one package lower than the one I had to save something like $10 a month. Then, I was taken to a page that had check boxes showing my extras (Caller ID, Call Waiting), and the one I had turned off wasn't listed. When I submit my change request, the website claimed I was going to be paying the same as before I backed things down. I tried again, and when I got to the page with the checkboxes, I saw there was a link in small print that said something like "additional options", and sure enough when I clicked that another check box came up showing that Verizon had conveniently signed me up for the extra service that I had just turned off. Once I re-turned off the option from the hidden page, *then* I got my lower price package. So Verizon appears to have coded their website to sign you up for things you try to turn off and hide that from you unless you poke around carefully.
Dealing with any service company like this is sure to induce feelings of intense pain. Hence the success of sites like Consumerist.
What you discus is not capitalism, it is an unregulated market. All markets need regulation and enforcement of said regulations. They get away with shit like this because our government lets them and we let the government do nothing. Why do you think there is so much E. coli 0157 showing up in our food supply.
I'm just coming out of a contract dispute with my, now, former provider. Being a bit of a nerd I've been following industry practices, and lawsuits pretty closely. You said "didn't use to be that way", while the problems weren't exactly the same, back in the Ma Bell monopoly days things weren't exactly rosey. I don't advocate a return to that system. Never the less, your right, changes do need to be made. Fortunately an increasing amount of scrutiny is being focused on the communications industry, and they're beginning to feel the heat. There's still along way to go though.
Communications is not truly an open market. On the wired front, local government isn't going to allow vast numbers of competing companies to dig up the streets to lay lines. On the wireless front, would be entrepreneurs have to deal with the fact that the FCC limits their access to the market. The following testimony is worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk87e-bGlIk
Jason Devitt's company blog was where the Verizon CPNI story broke recently:
http://skydeck.com/blog/mobilemarket/get-ready-for-more-advertising-on-…
The still idiotic Terms a Conditions of many companies have also drawn so much ire lately that they have begun changing, at least in some instances. We just need to keep the heat on. The ongoing EFF lawsuit on warrantless wiretapping has also help focus attention on the industry.
Until things get better I've opted to with a prepaid SIM card in an unlocked phone. None of these companies have my personal info, I have no contract obligations, and no personally identifying information is associated with my number.
Switch your landline phones over to VOIP, which usually provides toll-free calling to the entire US and Canada plus all the bells and whistles that landline companies charge extra for at no extra charge (not to mention things like being able to check your voicemail from any internet connected computer). I went with Vonage and my previous $60+/month phone bill has gone down to $31 and odd change (including all taxes and fees), and I've had no problems with service or lost calls. It's also possible (not sure what it costs) to get a virtual number in another country so that people there can call you toll-free.
You might already have seen this, about the US Court of Appeals ruling confirming an FCC ruling that big telcos don't have to offer access to their lines for competitors:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071017-appeals-court-upholds-fcc…
Someone in Virginia took an interesting approach in dealing with Comcast.
Mark's post sounds like bad news. The only reason we have "cheap" broad band locally is that there is some actual competition between Comcast, Verizon and some other DSL providers.