OT - Cellphone billing

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 01:22:59PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> Any system that supports Signaling System 7 supports that.  It's part of 
> the call set up info, though name display requires accessing a 
> database.  SS7 has been in use for many years and any equipment that 
> doesn't support it is so old as to be obsolete.

That's why I figure call display (name display being slightly different)
doesn't cost them anything.  Any modern telephone equipment simply does
it by design at no additional cost.

> On my bill, it's $2.80/month.  As I mentioned in another message, 
> poverty activists demanded a cheaper pulse line, regardless of any costs 
> involved.  Also, IIRC, touch tones are not a tariffed item, so it's 
> easier for Bell to change the price.  It's long past the time the CRTC 
> should have rolled touch tone dialing into basic service.

Well the prices they advertise in general have nothing to do with the
real cost (other than always being lower than the real cost).  For
example rogers wants:

$29.95 for basic phone + 1 feature (features are of course for the most
part essentially free to provide)

But then they add in 911 costs (so does bell) which since it is
mandetory ought to be in the base price.  They then add a system access
fee, which seems odd since well you would think if you pay them for
phone service they would let you use their system without paying extra
for it, but hey it's a great place to hide $4.50 of the actual monthly
charge.  So they get to advertise $29.95 when in fact the cost is closer
to $40 for the advertised service.  Of course they claim the system
access fee is to cover upgrade costs of maintaining the network.  Ehm,
no, your profits from my monthly service fee is how you cover those
costs.  You want to provide a service and make money on it then you have
to invest some of that money you make back into keeping it a good
service.  It ought to be illegal.  It certainly is unethical.

Never mind what I think of sales taxes not being included in the posted
prices on things. :)

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists