This is Broken II
At Skydeck we think a lot of things are broken in the US wireless market. Here are some of our recent favorites:
Rebates aren’t supposed to be easy to get. They are a form of price discrimination. Instead of asking us how much we are prepared to pay, carriers give everyone rebates and only people who are really price-sensitive get round to cashing them. But now AT&T has stopped paying out cash altogether. Instead they send you a Visa debit card: a form of payment that many stores do not accept, is difficult to combine with other forms of payment, and expires after a couple of months. A consumer organization is suing them for false advertising. (Bonus: Seth Godin rant.)
You probably heard about Sprint terminating a few thousand subscribers for making too many calls to customer service. But what about the 200 soldiers they tried to disconnect for excessive roaming … at West Point?
There’s a lot of terms that we don’t like in carrier contracts, and one is the arbitration clause: “whatever happens, you can’t sue us.” In a case brought against T-Mobile, a California court says Oh Yes You Can.