Bell, Telus, I Hope You Get Screwed
And surprisingly, no, I don’t mean that in the tenderly making love to your partner kind of way.
I have to admit one of my best fantasies is all three of the major telecom companies going down is a fiery blaze. The only thing these companies can do effectively is piss off their customers with their archaic company models. So I was a little happy when I heard that both Bell and Telus are being lined up to face class action lawsuits in Quebec.
Ok, a lot of happy.
The point of contention is the new fees Bell and Telus are trying to levy on cell phone users, fifteen cents charge added to previously free text messages. Which is, of course, an outrageous money grab but in addition to that subscribers have no way to not receive text messages, including oh so wonderful spam texts. As a previous Bell customer let me assure you, they have more spam than a can of ham.
If this actually gets to court, even if it doesn’t necessarily cause any changes, it may still give these telecoms a reason to think for a second about throwing down any charges they like; if we can get them to rack up a lot of legal fees.
The lawsuits are being laid on the reasoning that they can’t just make changes in the middle of a contract. Which in the rational world makes sense, but I wouldn’t count on the rationality of contract law. If they do win? Telecoms watch out. They’ve all been doing this for years; price changes, lowering limits, cutbacks on services, included features being discluded. All of them, from internet to cable to phone, and yet the prices never seem to go down. Perfect example, a few months ago Rogers cut back my internet bandwidth by five gigabytes and yet I still have to pay the same amount.
It will be awhile before we hear anything on this case, but I’ll be waiting, with a bottle of champagne just in case.
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