Canada pulls a Grocery Choice in telco land

A recent article on Slashdot described a situation with an uncanny resemblance to the Grocery Choice debacle in Australia. The Canadian government commissioned and funded a “Cell Phone Cost Calculator” to help consumers wade through the thicket of plans and offers in the market. Pressure is applied by the industry, the project gets scrapped. How unusual.

Scott Adams, who writes nerd-office comic strip Dilbert, coined the term confusopoly to describe a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price. Telecommunications often fits squarely in this mould. There is:

• no technical reason for 30-second billing vs per-second billing,
• no technical reason for plans to have “included value” that runs out at the end of a month,
• no way sending an SMS costs anything approaching 25c: in fact, due to the way these messages are prioritised, they should effectively be free as they use unused spectrum

These are all mechanisms to slice and dice the same old offerings and extract maximum value from consumers. The best consumers for telcos are those that sign up to expensive plans and never use them, letting the “value” expire at the end of each month. The plan tricks are all about forcing you to define your expected usage up-front, often for as much as two years into the future. This doesn’t help the telco in any way, just forces the customer to stay with the carrier and, ideally, results in all sorts of large “off-plan” charges

A couple of interesting comments came up in the comments of that Slashdot article.

The Illinois Citizens Utility Board has a “Cellphone Saver” tool where you upload past bills and it analyses it to see whether another plan would be a better deal for you. There are, of course, a heap of caveats and the like on the tool, for plans that can’t fit into their system.

According to one comment, Norway has a similar service, but it is mandated by the government. One source claims it is telepriser.no, but that link doesn’t work for me. All mobile providers in Norway are required to submit details of their plans in a defined format, and the data is loaded into the government’s site so consumers can compare apples with apples.

What I would propose is a hybrid of these two systems. Telcos would be required to provide details of their plans in a standardised format, publicly available to anyone who wants to download it. They would also be required to provide an electronic version of the last 12 months’ worth of bills to any consumer who wants it, in a standardised format. Ideally using a unique customer bill access key printed on the bill, which would be available from a public web service. Then anyone could run a comparison site, including competitors, using the publicly-available plan information and the loadable bill data.

An example: Choice runs a mobile phone comparison site and regularly pulls the latest plan information from a government source, so has details of every plan in the market. Consumers come to the site, enter their unique bill access key and the Choice site pulls their bills from their current provider. Choice then analyses the usage against all the other plans on the market to see if they would have been better off on another plan. Past usage is surely a better guide to future usage than a guess.

Now the telcos would bleat on about the standard format being unable to capture all the permutations they have in plans. But there are no good reasons apart from confusing customers for these wrinkles. There would need to be a mechanism for updating the standardised format if telcos really do want new features, but it shouldn’t be that bloody hard!

Politicians: don’t let telcos bamboozle you with claims it’s all too hard. Their own internal systems handle this stuff, and thousands of old plans doing slightly-different things. It’s actually their core business, so if they’re unwilling to do it it’s only because it increases competition in their cosy little ecosystem.

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