Cell Phone Cost Calculator Killed In Canada | Hacker News Reader

Cell Phone Cost Calculator Killed In Canada

antoniocangiano.com

34 pointsacangiano20 comments

I lived in Canada for three years and frequently called and occasionally traveled to the United States. The Canadian cell phone plans are so overpriced that I found it significantly cheaper to have a Verizon plan (the "North American plan") than a Bell, Rogers, or Fido plan. This is after taking into account the US/Canadian exchange rate when the Canadian dollar was trading at 85-90 cents per US dollar. How can it be that Verizon (arguably the most expensive US cell carrier) offers a better priced plan than a domestic Canadian carrier? Consider the fact that Verizon must include in its variable costs any additional fees it has to pay to a Canadian carrier to provide coverage on a Canadian network (Rogers or Bell).

Note that the cell plans in Canada at first glance look somewhat affordable relative to plans available in other countries. However, the pricing for Canadian plans is often deceptive. Not only are there additional "access fees" and taxes (more so than in the USA), but many standard features must be purchased a la carte, such as voicemail and caller ID.

> but many standard features must be purchased a la carte, such as voicemail and caller ID.

In the implementation I'm preparing I will take those things (Caller ID, Call forwarding, Call waiting, voicemail, etc...) into consideration as well.

Why is it up to the government to make something like this?

Choosing a phone/carrier/plan in Canada is a significant pain point. If a simple, comprehensive, and accurate tool like this existed, it would likely become quite popular (if one does exist, I want to know about it!)

The biggest challenge - other than design - is making sure the pricing data is complete and up to date. I'm not sure how the government project planned to deal with this - whether they expected the carriers to cooperate (hah!), or whether they were planning to hire people to maintain the data from publicly available sources.

Either way, with the right structure, this could be a great project to crowdsource. The only similar things I've seen use a blog or forum structure.

These are some good points. Antonio, have you considered making software to allow people to upload their phone bills? One would need to think carefully about how to strip identifying data and demonstrate that you'd stripped it. But that seems like a soluble problem, especially in an open source context.

If you made it easy for me to upload my bill every month and made it transparent how the data was being scraped, I would totally do it. In fact, it would be a pleasure to make a small contribution to genuine competition.

The telcos would sooner or later try to thwart it, but that would draw attention to the whole endeavour.

That's a very interesting idea.

It sometimes feels like the Canadian version of the vi-vs-emacs debate is Bell-vs-Rogers - specifically, which one is more evil.

I would welcome any way to even the playing field a bit. If that involves sharing my bill - I'm happy to do it. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one.

> Antonio, have you considered making software to allow people to upload their phone bills?

That's what I had in mind when I wrote my article.

There are two viable approaches. The simplest one is to ask questions about the current or planned usage, and provide the best plans accordingly.

The second, more complex, one would be to allow a person to upload their phone bill, parse it, analyze it and determine the most advantageous plan(s) according to their usage patterns.

This is the most complex option because ideally it should allow for some flexibility in terms of handling bills from different carriers, entirely stripping the personal data (e.g., not even storing it somewhere on the server), and so on. However, it's also the sleekest and easiest one from the user's perspective.

It would be neat to offer both versions, this way a user could decide which method they prefer. And from an implementation standpoint, it would make sense to release the first method first, and then add uploading capabilities at a later stage.

Another challenge for the project will be ensuring that the data for the plans are up to date, but a solid effort in this regard and a good disclaimer should be enough to make a service like this useful, honest and (hopefully) lawsuit proof.

It shouldn't be up to the government. All getting government involved would do is create new opportunities for corporate corruption to hose up the whole mess. As long as this doesn't prevent any private efforts to do the same thing, the fact government has stopped moving forward on the matter is probably a blessing in disguise.

Except no one has been or is doing this. The government in Canada steps up in some places when there is insufficient private investment.

Except it doesn't.

Who's crazy enough to try to compete with the government on something like that? As long as the government looks likely to do it, private efforts probably aren't going to happen -- unless it turns out that there's strong public dislike for the government version.

Now that government appears to have bowed out of the market niche, there's a possibility that private efforts might move forward. Of you're a Canadian with entrepreneurial spirit of your own, maybe you should look into making something like this happen before someone beats you to it (or even before some major telco manages to create a biased version of this and manages to convince people it's objective "enough").

The Norwegian government made a similar site in 2002, because they felt the confusion around the "products" made it easier to hide hidden costs. Because no such service existed, they had to make it themselves.

Consumer information from the government is likely to be as accurate as the USDA Food Pyramid (aka "what to eat to keep the food industry healthy.") Lots of consumer protection groups thrive in the US without any government support except non-profit status. Check out this list (the link is .gov, but most of the organizations listed are private):

http://www.consumeraction.gov/resprt2.shtml

Without a doubt, each group has an agenda, so you have to be careful. Some are lefty, some are just industry fronts, and they all have an inevitable interest in increasing their own power and budget. But how is that any worse than the government? At least this way you aren't at the mercy of whatever power is temporarily in national ascendance. You can pick a group that reflects your own ideals. Maybe Canadian citizens should join Consumer's Union or a similar Canadian group and lobby them to produce the cell phone calculator with their own funds.

> Why is it up to the government to make something like this?

It isn't. But the idea that telcos lobby elected officials to stop such an initiative doesn't speak well for these companies nor our representatives.

True. Think of this as a case of pure win, though:

1. Government won't get its fingers into something it should (have to) do, and thus won't spend tax money unnecessarily.

2. You have more ways to evaluate the corruption and dishonesty of specific representatives and corporations.

It's not like the corruption didn't exist before you found out about it, after all.

The situation - an entrenched oligopoly using government influence to continue screwing the whole country - really is intolerable, or barely tolerable, so it's possible that your project could attract a groundswell of support. There must be many people in Canada who grit their teeth forking out money to these overlords in what is supposedly a market economy. There are probably many who, like me, have cycled through the different providers in disgust, only to find that they're all worse than each other.

If you go through with this, I'll be interested to follow your progress. You should probably get set up to accept donations.

I wrote one of these calculators in 2000 for a bank, my first paid job out of college. I have no idea what happened with it, but it was in VB (don't ask), and took about 2 days to write.

If I'm feeling brave later, I may have a look to see if I still have the code.

Can someone explain how building this is more than a weekend project for a talented amateur?

Coding it is not difficult. The real problem is how to keep it updated.

Most of the prices are found on very unstructured web pages that are difficult to crawl. You might even get sued if you provide incorrect information. One possible solution is to get the companies to send you updated information themselves, but that's not likely to happen. At least not until you get too popular to ignore.

I lived in Australia.

Boy, that cell phone service sucked. Virgin cost too much and had no coverage. Also, Telstra is an evil megacorporation kept alive with government incentives. Also, Vodaphone seems to ignore rural Australia's existence.

I lived in Europe.

Boy, that cell phone service sucked. It cost too much and had no coverage. Also, it required me to recharge through some obscure SIM-specific menu that crashed my phone a bunch. Also, when I went 20 km to the west and crossed into another country, the service mysteriously didn't work until I kept going another 50 km and crossed into another country.

I lived in Canada.

Boy, that cell phone service sucked. Rogers is an evil megacorporation bent on taking over Canada, charged me an arm and a leg for everything and didn't work except when I stood on my head and prayed to the Inukshuk of reception. Also, Bell's obsoletely fatuous CDMA network (and horrible phone selection) screwed me over too much to mention. Also Fido is just a shill for Rogers. Also, Telus is laughable and triple-charged me for a phone once.

Now I live in the USA.

Boy, this cell phone service sucks. AT&T has no coverage, overcharges and is hated by everyone. Etc.

Wait, I feel like there's a pattern here.

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