[TheForge] [OT] [telcos] Re: Small shop questions

[Mike Spencer]

>> 	...pretenses of 25 cents a minute 24x7.
>
>  I hope you aren't paying $0.25 per minute. We pay $0.029...

I wish I had $0.01 for every manhour [1] spent since divesiture on:

    + Shopping for the best phone rates

    + Arguing about who has scored the best phone rate deal

    + Waiting on hold to talk to a telco/CLEC droid about problems

    + Arguing with droid about service or charges

    + Recounting telco horror stories

    + Trying to figure out exactly what your phone deal is supposed to
      get you, what it does get you, what you have been billed for and
      by whom.

The whole phone pricing, ILEC/CLEC & LD competition thing smells to me
pretty much like the the case where a "shopper" will rack up an extra
15 miles in the SUV, spending an afternoon driving between
supermarkets, coupons and Special Sale ads in hand, to save 3 cents on
cocoa, 19 cents on coffee and so on, totalling $3.42 savings for an
afternoon's work.

"Giving the consumer choices" is fine in principle but in the phone
case, making, implementing and maintaining the choice often costs more
than worst case of not having or making the choice.

Ooop.  Sorry.  Another rant coming on.  Better stop here.  :-)

- Mike

[1] Okay, person-hour.  But it seems to be mainly men who have an
    obsession with complicated telco savings gambits.



-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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