Smartphone users should unite to fight for these 10 rights

In Canada and the U.S. a truly competitive wireless market doesn't exist. Instead, it's an oligopoly, which is one reason why Canada is one of the top three most expensive countries for wireless service in the world (along with the U.S. and Spain). It's about time users stood up for their rights!
11/11/2009 7:00:00 AM By: Mark Sullivan

Many smartphone owners are frustrated with the high prices they pay to wireless service providers, as well as the treatment they get from providers once they're locked into a two-year service contract.

North Americans have limited choices in mobile broadband devices and services, and mobile operators in the Canada and the U.S. currently enjoy relative freedom from regulation.

Because of those two conditions and in light of the millions of dollars Canadians spend on wireless devices and services, a bill of rights is necessary to protect users against mistreatment by service providers.

Following are the standards, safeguards and solutions we'd like to see.

1. Smartphone owners should pay for wireless services by the bit, not by the minute or by the message.

These days, voice, data, and messaging all travel the same way -- as bits of data -- over the wireless operator's network.

Therefore, charges for all of those services should be based on the same thing, by "bits of data transferred."

Using that standard would help consumers in two ways.

First, it would create a real relationship between the actual work (moving bits) the mobile provider does to deliver the service, and the price it charges.

Second, with charges made on the same basis, consumers would have a way to make genuine apples-to-apples comparisons between the costs of voice, data, and messaging services, and ask questions about any pricing disparities.

Currently, providers keep the actual cost of delivering wireless services completely hidden from subscribers, and that cost has no bearing whatsoever on pricing.

The classic example is text messaging: The provider incurs almost no cost to deliver texts, yet Telus, Bell and Rogers (since July 2009) charge customers (who aren't on a plan) 15 cents per message.

A huge controversy was sparked last year when Bell and Telus announced, last year, that they would start charging for incoming text messages as well.

Federal NDP Leader Jack Layton called the move a "cash grab" and his party started a Facebook campaign to protest the charges.

While Industry Minister Jim Prentice initially made some promising noises, after meeting with Bell and Telus he said his government would not introduce new legislation over the changes. And that was that.

Meanwhile, in North America, text messaging has become a multi-billion dollar business -- larger than the music, movie, and game industries combined.

Service providers should be required to offer a pay-as-you-go messaging plan wherein customers pay based on the amount of bandwidth they use to send messages, not on the number of messages they send.

Also, the cost of SMS fees should not increase more than 1 per cent in any given year.

Under the bits approach, mobile operators would be free to sell services at whatever prices they chose, and in whatever bundles they wished--as long as they disclosed exactly how much a consumer would pay, per bit of data transferred, for each service.

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