If you’ve looked closely at your wireless bill lately, you’ve probably been pretty happy. Wireless plan rates have been going down for a while now. During this economic crisis, we’ll take whatever help we can get, right? Not so fast. The rates for wireless plans have gone down, this is true. But wireless carriers aren’t making less money. In fact, they’re probably making more profit than ever. And you’re paying for it.
At the same time that wireless carriers have been touting lower plan rates, they’ve been quietly raising prices for other services like text messaging and data transfer, which allows users to access e-mail and the Web. The Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN), a consumer advocacy group based in San Diego, did a study and found that the average cell phone user is paying about $3 per minute. They arrived at that figure by dividing the average number of minutes billed by the average number of minutes actually used by 700 customers.
Granted, the figure is skewed by those customers who pay for a large number of minutes but use very few. But even when those users are removed from the equation, users still pay an average of $.50 to $1 per minute, which is still much more than the few cents per minute wireless carriers advertise.
If you’re in the middle of a contract, there’s not much you can do about your rates. But when it’s time to renew, or if you switch carriers, be sure to examine just how much you’re being charged to give them your business.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Cell phone calls cost an average $3 a minute???
This preposterous assertion from UCAN San Diego should have set off skeptical alarm bells in any reputable journalist and editor. It didn’t.
This bogus story has been circulated around the nation. Newspapers, TV stations and blogs mindlessly published this LA TIMES story without any effort to fact check, or even to apply the giggle test (it fails miserably).
UCAN is a far left advocacy group, masquerading as a consumer organization. They favor nationalization of the utilities, and vehemently oppose deregulation, competition and the private sector in general. The study was a classic example of junk science, or, more accurately, junk research.
UCAN’s “scientific study” (87 pages, no less!) http://tinyurl.com/b563dc surveyed their OWN membership — a group dominated by low income senior citizens sporting tattered Che Guevara T-shirts. A third of those who responded (not polled — RESPONDED — to a UCAN website notice) had signed up for cell phone service and then seldom if ever used it. And this is the polling sample on which UCAN tells the nation that we are averaging $3 a minute for cell phone calls (and a ludicrous $.55 cents a minute for land line long distance, I might add).
Pathetic.
I might take your comment more seriously were it not for the fact that 1) while you bashed the UCAN study, you failed to provide any actual data to counter what their study showed, 2) while calling the UCAN a “far left advocacy group,” you state your position in San Diego Tax Fighters, which seems to be a far right advocacy group that favors the abolition of taxes, and endorses Republican candidates in local elections, and 3) you failed to maintain any professional decorum, instead resorting to petty insults. Che Guevara T-shirts? Is this an oblique reference to those low-income senior citizens being Hispanic? If so, it’s just another reason to disregard your diatribe.