Aversarial relationships

It never ceases to amaze me about large companies that spend years building adversarial relationships with their customers and then when an alternative is offered, they are astonished when the customers leave.

Case in point: Phone Companies. My dad used to tell me that back in the day the phone company was worse than it is now, but some of the things that he told me are a little hard to believe. What isn't hard to believe is the gouging that my generation has been through with the phone company.

Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, it used to be long distance to call from Dallas to Fort Worth. At the border between the cities, the area codes changed and it was long distance to call even 3 or 4 miles sometimes. To get around this, the phone company introduced the Metro Line. For $60 a month, you had the priviledge of calling a couple miles down the road without having to pay long distance.

When you had a problem with your line, you got to endure endless teleprompting to talk to a rude, less than helpful operator. They nickle and dimed you for everything and every feature, too.

Then the magic of inexpensive cell phones came. In 1994, I completely shut off my land line and got a Sprint PCS phone. For $60 a month, I got 600 anytime minutes that I could use to call anywhere in the US. That was more than sufficient for me, and I haven't had a phone line since.

I guess it's normal these days for young single people to not have land lines. VOIP is another technology people are leaving telcos for. I prefer Vonage and no one is the wiser that I'm not really on a land line. It allows me to use my regular telephones and acts like a standard phone line. We had our house built 2 years ago, and the wires that the phone company uses are still hangining loose off the side of my house.

Now the telcos have figured out that they stand to lose more and more customers each year. So, instead of making their services cheaper and easier to use, they are looking to blackmail backbone users with a tiered internet structure where content providers would have to pay an extortion fee so their content would be delivered reliably.

Cell phone companies are running into a similar problem. They have been gouging their customers for years. You pay $40 a month for 600 minutes, but then every additional minute is $.30. Now with widespread wi-fi access, you can use VOIP technology in increasingly wider areas on the move. It won't be too much longer before you can take a wi-fi device such as the D-Link DPH-540 and make VOIP calls from within major metro areas. Some cities are entertaining the concept of a public wireless network which would eliminate nearly every cost associated with making a call.

Of course the Cell phone companies are still going about their old ways. Hear me now Cellular Companies! It's not too late! People don't want the hassle of alternate technologies, they are tired of getting bent over every month when it comes time to pay!