The Flow of Consciousness

The CPCEA of 2007 would allow consumers to break contracts within 30 days of signing for any reason. It also forces carriers to share simplified information on fees and service and calls for the FCC to “investigate” cell phone locking (something which I believe should be illegal anyway).

Here’s the letter I wrote to Senators Casey and Specter of Pennsylvania. It’s a modified version of a well-written comment from the Slashdot article on the CPCEA.

I write to urge you to oppose the Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007, on the basis that it gives a stamp of approval to the whole idea of long term cell contracts: even if my cell provider provides perfectly good service, I should be able to drop them any time I feel like it, just like a landline phone. I can cancel a landline phone any time I want to, and the phone company has to cut the bill off based on the number of days of the month I actually had the phone line active. Why should a cellular provider be able to give me any less generous terms?

Many negative factors about the US cell phone system rely on the lengthy contracts or are caused by them: the US gets only the sub-par phones the carriers choose to offer and not all the exciting phones sold in Europe and Japan, because, in the US, the carriers sell all the phones and because it’s the excuse for the lengthy contracts.

Indeed, the only really innovative phone to come along in the US is the iPhone, and even then it is contractually tied to a single carrier (even though there are unofficial efforts to change that). Also, in the US, we have less technological advancement in the network itself because the carriers know you’re locked in and can only use the phones they select, so they have less incentive to upgrade because you can’t leave them and there’s little competition if you could.

Further, all the carriers have reputations for poor customer service and network reliability issues in some locations, and, frankly, they’re also all reputed to not care very much, because they know that any customer churn they suffer will be replaced by incoming competitors fleeing the exact same problems from their “competitors”.

If we eliminated the lengthy contracts, cell companies would lose their incentive to offer discounts on phones, and would likely choose to start charging full price for phones. This would likely result in a competitive market for equipment arising, resulting in more consumer choice. Further, carriers would then have to directly compete on plan prices and services, resulting in more consumer choice on plans, likely lower prices, and probably also the companies improving their network speed in an effort to actually compete with each other for a change.

They’d have to start caring about dropped calls instead of just blaming the customer, because the customer can actually drop them on the spot and go to someone else until they find someone who can actually give them reliable service.

One would ask that Congress should ban all telecommunications contracts, but this is overbearing. However, a ban on all fees for breaking a telecommunications contract because of poor service would have essentially the same effect.

(note: this letter is an edited and heavily modified version of another’s letter to his senators)