{"id":149,"date":"2010-05-01T03:31:34","date_gmt":"2010-05-01T08:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/?p=149"},"modified":"2020-06-02T00:48:03","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T05:48:03","slug":"verizons-pr-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/149\/verizons-pr-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Verizon’s PR Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I was reading an article titled\u00a0Family, Verizon far apart over nearly $18,000 phone bill<\/a>; basically, a college kid thought his family’s unlimited data plan was still in effect, and downloaded a little over 1 GB over the network, only to find out that they were being charged at a rate of $15 per MB (the homepage of Amazon.com is 0.9 MB).<\/p>\n

Just to illustrate how ridiculous this scenario would be in any other market, here is an equivalent story where data == water.<\/p>\n

Imagine that you get your water from a little company called Verizon. They normally supply water at a price of $100 per month for an unlimited amount, but for the past 2 years they’ve given you a promotional deal where you get unlimited water for free.\u00a0Your son has a garden and uses quite a bit of water for irrigation, but it’s fine — after all, you have limitless water for free.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One day you get a bill in the mail from Verizon for $18,000. You had (understandably) forgotten that your 2-year promotional deal had ended 2 months ago. Now, this bill staring back at you says that since you did not have the $100\/month unlimited plan for the past 2 months, you must pay for your water usage at a rate of $10 per cup, for a total of $18,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Should you have to pay the whole bill? Based on the above scenario, the answer to is quite obviously no, so the real question is: \u00a0if not $18,000, how much should\u00a0you have to pay? Even that is pretty clear: 2 months for unlimited water at $100 per month, for a total of $200,\u00a0plus tack on some silly management fee for rolling you over into the unlimited water plan, giving $225 as the grand total. Water works as a fairly accurate and handily intuitive comparison to data transfer \u2014\u00a0most of the differences between the two are not relevant here.<\/p>\n

At first, this news report was rather infuriating, since an innocent family was to be burdened with a $18,000 debt for no good reason. After more thought, it is simply puzzling as to why Verizon thinks it’s a good PR move to defend its position. And the story above makes it more than apparent how overages like this one should be handled \u2014 it’s not as if the water coming out of your tap will ever suddenly go from costing $0.02 per cup to costing $10 per cup, because you used beyond your monthly limit.<\/p>\n

Consumers should demand a stop to being tricked into giving telcos extra money for something that has a marginal cost equal to its non-marginal cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I was reading an article titled\u00a0Family, Verizon far apart over nearly $18,000 phone bill; basically, a college kid thought his family’s unlimited data plan was still in effect, and downloaded a little over 1 GB over the network, only … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guywyant.info\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}