Is your old phone annoying Cingular Wireless?

[Mike Rochip]

NEW YORK - About 4.7 million Cingular Wireless subscribers with older phones will have to pay $5 extra each month as the company tries to prod them to get new handsets so it can devote its entire network to one type of signal.

 

The new fee, which will generate $23.5 million a month for Cingular, adds to a confusing array of surcharges and government taxes that, regardless of the wireless company, can boost the average cellular bill by up to 50 percent from the advertised rate.

 

Article

 

If you don't pay the fine Cingular will issue a warrant and have you arrested. Not buying new stuff when you're happy with your old stuff is a felony I think.

[Andavari]

If you don't pay the fine Cingular will issue a warrant and have you arrested. Not buying new stuff when you're happy with your old stuff is a felony I think.

 

Yeah and they could easily loose a hell of allot of profit when someone bitchslaps them with a lawsuit for several millions of dollars. Companies never learn.

[Mike Rochip]

Yeah and they could easily loose a hell of allot of profit when someone bitchslaps them with a lawsuit for several millions of dollars. Companies never learn.

 

Andavari hit the nail on the head. If consumers don't fight this by suing Cingular it won't be long at all before a whole lot of other companies use the same methods at our expense.

 

It will be interesting to see how the government and the judicial system respond to companies that pursue shady revenue enhancing tactics such as this. In this day of hands off regulation and "what's good for big business is good for the consumer" I wouldn't count on these institutions acting for our benefit as opposed to big business'.

 

I firmly believe healthy competition where a company's products and services sell themselves based on their own merits is much better [and fairer] than a system where companies lock in their revenue by tricking us into accidentally binding ourselves to a "legal" contract that becomes more expensive whenever they decide they need to increase their bottom line.

 

Think of all the products you own that require you to pay for a service to use them like cable, home security systems, internet access, extended warranties, utilities, club memberships, etc. If the companies that provide these services are allowed to charge you extra for using a product or service you purchased in good faith earlier that is now not the most current [or expensive] product they offer, you are in effect being held hostage. You basically have three choices all of which will make the company money at your expense:

 

Continue to use the older product and pay the surcharge.

Purchase the newer product and/or service at greater expense.

Cancel the service and pay substancial early termination penalties.

 

The purchase of an improved product or service should be the choice of the consumer based on the advantages that it would bring and not because a company or provider wants to arbitrarily increase its revenue.

 

It almost seems ridiculous that a company could legally be allowed to control you simply because you purchased one of their products. But it's already happening with Digital Rights Management [DRM]. You agree to subject yourself to legal action if you circumvent DRM protections because by doing so you may cause an unfair loss of revenue for the recording artist, their label, the distribution company. etc. How do they know [or care] that you only want to make a backup copy? However, the fact that these protections are being used to try to prevent the LOSS of legitimate earnings for the companies and their artists makes it very different than what Cingular is doing which is trying to GAIN unearned revenue at the expense of their customers. I'm no fan of DRM but at least I can see what the intent is and can choose for myself whether or not to purchase products that use it. I can feel pretty safe knowing that my Bruce Springsteen CD is not secretly plotting to steal money from my bank account. I guess I can't say the same for my phone.

 

 

 

 

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[Andavari]

Cancel the service and pay substancial early termination penalties.

 

They would have to jail me because I wouldn't pay them s**t if they themselves are responsible for breaching an original contract that I agreed to by changing it without any notice - I would actually sue them in a heartbeat if they f'd with me. Anyways it will probably bite them in the ass when consumers form a group and sue them as a whole versus on an individual basis.

[Eldmannen]

Hope that FTC looks into this, and that there will be a lawsuit.

 

What Cingular is doing, sucks.