AHHHHH greed thy name is Cellphone Company. Seriously with all the complaints people have had about high prices of cellphones you'd think Telus and Bell would be working hard to show the value in their product. Apparently this is not the case and they have decided to just see what we'll put up with. I guess there is no point in having a virtual monopoly if you don't abuse it. I like the part in the article where they say they need the charges to cover increasing text messaging costs. What kind of costs would those be exactly? at the rate they're charging for a 160 character message that's about 11 characters per penny it seems unlikly that it is costing that much. Imagine if you got charged by your interent service provider 15 cents per e-mail or even worse an amount of a penny for every 11 characters you'd be having to sell the house to afford e-mail in no time. And yes i know you can avoid the charge by paying for a plan but that might set you back 5$ a month when you don't text enough to make that worth your while. There is of course another way to avoid the charge, you can switch to a competitor such as Virgin, Rogers or Fido. Granted if your stuck in a 3 year contract you're basically toast as the costs outside of the basic plan charges are not covered by it so you might be paying 3-5 $ extra a month just to get spam or messages from friends that you didn't really need. Personally I can't wait till the end of the spectrum auction and we get a look at some of the new players out there.
Telus and Bell get 0 stars out of 5 for changing their plans in a way that will drive consumers to seek other options when they look for cellphones.
