rant….
I decided to switch from prepaid cellphone service to a monthly plan… The plan price is $20 for 200 minutes…. Not so bad, BUT, there are some extra charges:
- $8/month for “system access fee”, whatever that is, considering I’m paying $20 for the service itself.
- plus $1/month for 911 access fee
- plus $7 to display the caller’s phone number. This is just nuts. I need to pay to see who is calling me. Note that the caller can still choose to show or hide his/her number.
- received calls are charged at the same price as made calls
- activation fee of $35, even after being a prepaid customer of them
add the tax to it and the $20 monthly plan is now $40 per month… I’m still deciding if I should go back to prepaid… but for a country where I pay more for insurance per year than my car is worth (year 2000 ford focus sedan), nothing looks strange anymore…. I doubt that there is such thing as consumer protection around here…
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April 11th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Next time read between lines.
Welcome to Canada!
April 11th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Nuno,
what pisses me off is that this fees are not hidden between lines! Some (like the caller id “feature”) are even advertised and nobody seems to care! I’ve used cellphones in quite a few countries and the caller number was always displayed for free. Also, paying a system access fee after paying for the monthly service package does not seem right. But hey, this is a monopoly… of two companies. Bell and rogers have 95+% off the market and they do whatever they want, since they’re the only ones with decent coverage in Canada.
I switched from prepaid because it was also a ripoff. Paying for received calls and sms was taking all my money, so I decided to try the monthly minutes approach. Still don’t know which one is the least bad.
But at the end, I don’t know if what pisses me off more is the monopoly itself or the fact that no one seems to really care and think it’s normal to pay all this stupid fees….
April 29th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
At least the Internet is cheaper in there, and faster too! You can’t expect to have everything for free. :p
Regards
April 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Haha.. I whish :-)) Internet is more expensive and slower in here