Beware the upgrade - mobile phone contracts are a rip-off anyway
2007-09-21 | Filed Under PR |
The last post got me thinking about mobile phone contracts. If you think about phone minutes as a commodity (like pork bellies in Trading Places), then what you’ve done is agreed to buy a set number of minutes for a price that’s fixed for a year or eighteen months. Lucky you.
Because that’s where the rip-off comes. If you don’t use your minutes, you get charged anyway. If you go over your minutes, then you pay at an extortionate rate. So, you might think, the only way to win is to get it right and use up your minutes and no more. But even then, you’d be wrong. What happens if the price of your commodity goes down? You lose out, because you’ve agreed to pay that price for 18 months. And you could lose out big (my current contract is 25p a minute, and there are people out there doing 10p a minute or less).
Ah, but the price might go up. Unlikely - there’s too much competition (and regulator pressure) for mobile rates to go up. So we are all losing out big time. No wonder we keep getting free phones and upgrades - it’s so they can lock us in to another over-priced contract.
As they say, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. .
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