10 Things We hate About Wireless Carriers

1. Carriers Overcharge For Service

2. You're a global laggard in new technologies

3. Handset discounts are a shell game, not a 'subsidy

4. You seek new ways to get money for nothing

5. You want to lock me in

6. You aggressively oppose net neutrality

7. You want to lock out competition

8. Your solution to public opposition is more lobbying

9. You're growing too powerful

10. You've forgotten that we own the airwaves

Some excerpts from the above statements....

And yet another example is the charging of minutes for both parties for each call. In Europe, the caller pays minutes for the call, and the receiver pays nothing. In the U.S., both caller and callee pay.

Carriers employ experts to examine all the angles to figure out which combination of bundles and packages and pricing will extract the most money from each customer. It's not about charging more money for better service. It's about charging more money for the same service.

New York Times columnist David Pogue launched a high-visibility effort last month to address just one of the many ways carriers shamelessly take money away from customers for nothing. Pogue noticed that most of the carriers have mandatory, 15-second voicemail instructions that are played after your own voice-mail message is played. For example, Verizon plays: "At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5."

Everyone already knows how to leave a voicemail message. Apple required AT&T to drop the requirement, for example, and somehow iPhone users are still communicating with each other.

Pogue estimates that Verizon, for example, takes $620 million a year away from customers for all the collective "minutes" required to listen to these messages. That's just one carrier, and just one example of how carriers make money by optimizing what they call Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

10 Things We Hate About Wireless Carriers - PC World