Canada's Wireless Code of Conduct aka Protect the Sheep from Themselves

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission may be ringing in 2013 with one of the most ridiculous plans yet.

The Wireless Code of Conduct is a set of guidelines for wireless carriers to adhere to in providing servics to consumers in Canada.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the complaints and recommendations that make up this code were submitted by Canadian consumers who may not even have the intelligence to dial a cell phone, let alone understand the services that they are buying.

Top of the list: Outlaw 3 Year Contracts

The main reason for even having a 3 year contract is due to the fact that the average Canadian can’t afford to pay the full price for a cell phone. Having a 3 year contract allows for the carrier to subsidize the cost of the hardware and pass that subsidization onto the consumer. If the CRTC reall does force carriers to remove the 3 year contract option, consumers are now going to be on the hook for shelling out more dough up front for their phone. Likely to the tune of $200 or more, depending on the type of phone they want to get.

What’s funny about the whole contract debacle is the fact that people don’t HAVE to get a 3 year contract right now. All carriers offer various contract lenghts, depending on how much you want to pay up front.

Right now, you can get a Windows HTC phone with no contract for $599 from Bell Canada. You can get a Samsung Galaxy S III from TELUS for $650.

A very smart tech chick (hat tip to @followsandi) suggested that if the consumer bought the hardware upfront, there should be a decrease on the monthly service fees, since you don’t need to subsidize the cost of the hardware. I’m all for that — and it makes good sense. The downside of that is that it REALLY exposes the carrier’s margin models, and unless one of the carriers sees this as a great way to improve transparency with its customers, it’s unlikely that this will happen. You never know.

I’d like to see a few more options for pre-payment of hardware —— if I want to put down 50% of the cost of the phone, I’d like to have a different contract length. I expect that I could walk into any wireless store and make this sort of arrangement, and it changes the outstanding commitments I have with that carrier, since commitment is linked to revenue spend.  Maybe that’s the way to go —- have a minimum spend commitment with a carrier, and when you meet/exceed that commitment, your contract is over, and you’re free to change, upgrade or do the hokey-pokey.

Some of the recommendations are reasonable: alerts when you get close to your data limits, or your voice minutes. EASY ways to upgrade or downgrade services on the fly. 

But really, those recommendations have little to do with consumer safeguards and more to do with service development of the carriers. I expect that some of these recommendations have a pretty heavy service development cost associated with them. The big carriers may be able to shoulder the capital costs of the system upgrades, but the new entrants are going to be challenged with providing additional service features on products that they’re already struggling with.

Sigh.

It’s not going to be pretty, and it’s not going to be the right thing, but silly consumers —- you’re going to get what you get.

I'm Not Writing about It...

Main Entry:	sensationalism  [sen-sey-shuh-nl-iz-uh m]  Show IPA
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	exaggeration
Synonyms:	aggrandizement, boasting, excess, fabrication,fish story, hype, hyperbole, overemphasis,puffery, tabloid journalism, tall story, whopper,yellow journalism

I’m not convinced that what the media has been doing in the past three days has been sensationalism. Nothing has been exaggerated. Over reported? Maybe. Repetitive? For sure. Invasion of privacy for the victims and families? Absolutely. But we’re reading about. Searching for more information, looking for answers.

Unfortunately - we’re likely not going to find anything of merit. It’s time to turn off the story.

While news media seems to be focused on only one incident, did you realize:

• John Kerry is likely going to be the next US Secretary of State, freeing up Hillary Clinton to run for the 2016 Presidential election? That’s pretty neat news.
• The opening of The Hobbit grossed $84M
• The Ikea Monkey is going to court
• Dead in 5 Heartbeats is going to be released soon - if you like Sons of Anarchy, you might like this
• You can Farm in a Tube!!!

I have to admit, it took some doing to come up with five articles that are completely unrelated to the tragedy of December 14th. 

But if all of us look beyond the front page —- the world is still turning, and people are still doing strange and wonderful things.

Increases from Bell Canada

If you live in Ontario and you are a Bell Canada customer for telephone services, chances are you got a lovely letter stating that your monthly service fee is going to increase in the new year.

Huh.

The increase is about 4.5%.

For a service that hasn’t change or improved in over 10 years. No innovation, no feature changes, no nothing. It’s pretty ballsy to foist an increase at this point.

The last time that Bell Canada had a product improvement on standard phone service was the introduction of call waiting and call display. 

I get it - it’s a legacy service. Product enhancements aren’t expected. However —— it’s a legacy service, it should NOT have price increases. If I was an enterprise customer, pricing would be going in the other direction.

I want a phone service that can do a few new things:

1. I want to be able to block telemarketers
2. I want to have different ring tones
3. I want to specify when I want the phone to ring, and when I want it to be mute.
4. Depending on who calls, I want to play a different voice mail recording.

Funnily enough, I bough a very cool Uniden handset last month, and it can do three of the four tricks I want Bell Canada to do. If I was still with Primus, their Talk Broadband did EVERYTHING I wanted. Unfortunately, with changes in the working arrangements in the house, we found ourselves not needing two phone lines, and Primus had to take it on the chin.

The ONLY reason we have a Bell phone line is for the ridiculous ease of ordering PPV movies. Now that I have Apple TV - we don’t even need to have a phone line for PPV, since I can’t remember the last time I ordered a movie from Bell…..

Good job Bell —- you have now convinced me I don’t have any compelling reason to keep your home phone service. You really should have left *well enough* alone.