Should you have cell phone insurance?

Whether or not you should have cell phone insurance depends on your individual circumstances and preferences. 

Obama Helps to Prevent Cell Phone Bill Shock

Thanks to some hard work by the Obama administration, the FCC will now require carriers to alert customers who are about to exceed data plan or text limits on calling plans. They are also required to inform customers who may be about to incur large roaming charges. The new cell phone billing notification rules would require cellular carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint to send text messages or voicemails to users as they approach their plans’ data or voice limits.  These regulations would also apply to international roaming charges. The messages would be automated and occur immediately without the need for a mobile application or opt-in. President Obama praised the industry announcement, saying

“Our phones shouldn’t cost us more than the monthly rent or mortgage. I appreciate the mobile phone companies’ willingness to work with my administration and join us in our overall and ongoing efforts to protect American consumers by making sure financial transactions are fair, honest and transparent.”

What is Phone Bill Cramming?

Phone Bill "Cramming" is the placement of unauthorized or misleading charges on phone bills.  Ever wonder what those strange charges are on your home phone or cell phone bill?  Crammers use confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe. One company Billing Services Group makes a living by scamming customers like you and me.  They charge you for "enhanced services," which may include the following:  collect calls, voicemail services, streaming video service, identity theft protection services, directory assistance, and one job skills training services.

Billing Services Group (Ticker: BILL) placed charges on nearly 1.2 million telephone lines on behalf of a serial phone crammer. The charges were supposedly for "enhanced services," such as voicemail and streaming video, that consumers never authorized or even knew about.  The Federal Trade Commission is seeking a civil contempt ruling against the nation's largest third-party billing company, alleging that Billing Services Group (BSG) placed more than $70 million in bogus "cramming" charges on consumers' phone bills.

What should you do?  Review your telephone bill every month with fine-tooth comb. Treat your telephone service like any other major consumer purchase or service. Ask yourself the following questions as you review your telephone bill:

• Do I recognize all the charges listed on my bill? 
• What services did the charges provide?
• Does my phone bill include charges for calls I did not place or services I did not authorize? 
• Are the rates and line items consistent with my quoted price? 

Please comment below if you have any other evidence of carriers colluding and experience about getting refunds.  

Taxes on Your Cell Phone Bill

Consumers are paying an average of $7.67 per month on their cell phone bill taxes per month.  Did you know that cell phone state tax rates range from 5% to 20% per month depending on where your cell phone bill is sent?  That is approximately $92 per year for the average cell phone bill which is $47.21 per month.  All together US consumers per $26,875,860,000 in total taxes from mobile phone customer each each by AT&T and Verizon.  No wonder AT&T and Verizon are the largest donors to Congress because it appears that its one big ponzi scheme.  We look for companies like Google to come into the market in the near future and provide advertising supported wireless to disrupt this telecom corruption and tax on consumers.   See the tax map provided by the TaxFoundation.org.  

Related Stories:
AT&T Steals $1 Billion from Customers in Illegal Taxes
Verizon Steals $93.5M From Taxpayers with Fake Surcharges & Taxes

Cell Phone State Tax Rates Are Ridiculous

Americans are now being paying an average of 16.26% tax on monthly cell phone bill.  Depending on the state that number can shoot up as high as 23.69%.  Each month, the talking tax is silently imposing on America's wireless customers, and unless legislative action is taken the rates go go even higher.  The highest states are Nebraska, Washington, New York, Florida and Illinois.  All the more reasons to start using free wireless whenever possible and dump your data plans because Wi-Fi competes with 4G LTE.  On top of these ridiculously expensive tax rates AT&T & Verizon are the most expensive carriers by far compared with wireless carriers around the world.  Not only do you pay high taxes each month but your data plans are funding two of the highest paying dividend companies on Wall Street.  See the tax map provided by the TaxFoundation.org.  

How to Avoid Early Termination Fees

Buy your phone outright without any subsidy and unlock it. It's that simple! However, if you are already in a contract and need some help read these two posts that will help you get some ideas on how to get out of a contract & how to drop early termination fees if you already purchased the phone.

Savvy smartphone users are among the most likely to leave their current carrier. According to a recent survey, 31% of U.S. consumers are ready to switch wireless providers. Some may even want to dump their carriers entirely and use their Gmail, Google Voice services in the cloud for almost free. Early termination fees are rising and carrier loyalty is fragile at best. Prior to the rise of smartphones, carrier loyalty has been tied more to network coverage and for many it still is. Consumers don’t want to worry about signal strength or proximity to a cellular tower in order to use a phone in their home or at the office.

The carriers realize that customer loyalty is not what it used to be in this age of cloud computing and Wi-Fi VoIP. So what do they do to keep their customers? Make you think they have been upgrading their networks with faster data services and new cloud syncing services. Now that smartphones are available on all the major U.S. carriers contracts or hand-cuffs have become the discussion more than the service. The carriers have answered this with higher termination fees.

Verizon was first this year, doubling the cost to get out of a contract from $350 from $175 on smartphones. AT&T followed suit by boosting its termination fee to $325, adding a higher exit barrier for consumers who want to leave the carrier. Increased upfront hardware subsidy costs at the time of purchase are the excuses given to the media but that is a lie since phone prices from the manufacture have actually decreased not doubled.

My advice to carriers if they want to keep their customers happy is pretty simple. Don’t raise the barriers for customers to leave your network by increasing termination costs. Why not let your service speak for itself by providing better coverage at a reasonable price. Consumers are becoming more phone savvy all the time and they can solve most of the problems themselves with WiFi.

Related Posts:
Customer Churn: Coverage vs.Contracts

How to Save Money on Phone Bills

One of the biggest expense items for companies who have large mobile workforces are the monthly cell phone bills.  Companies typically do their best to get all employees under one carrier in order to theoretically save money and get a deal.  However, how do you know that you are getting a deal?

1)  Are you buying new phones for each employee to be on the same plan?
2)  Are you auditing the monthly call activity over your employees?
3)  Are they getting the best service possible in your area?
4)  If all of your employees are on one carrier are you locked into a "good" price?
5)  Should you be encouraging your employees to use free WiFi more often instead of the expensive 4G or WiMax plans?
6)  What if you could give each of your employees a choice of which carrier and the handset or smart phone they wanted to use?
7)  Are you employees spending too much time managing their phone services and reporting expenses?
8)  Are you wasting valuable productivity time provisioning phones to your new employees and getting phones back from employees no longer with the company?
9)  Are you using VoIP for international calls?
10) Lastly, are you auditing and keeping track of the coverage service quality that your employees are getting and using this as leverage when you renew your contract?

Here are some companies that might help you make cheaper international calls with VoIP and audit your cell phone call activity through the carrier. Auditing your call activity is very important these days as dropped calls and coverage quality is actually getting worse as data speeds increase.  Most of these hosted solutions working with cell phones using unified communications tools and are sold directly to small businesses and directly to consumers.

Google Voice - Gives small businesses a second business number and makes voicemail more efficient.  It will also save money on international calls.
Skype - Great for video conferencing and making international calls and for businesses of any size.

Second Voice -  Large enterprises can audit and manage employee phones by adding a second number to an existing employee cell phone. 

Toktumi - Hosted PBX that gives employees a second number and has apps for your smartphone  

Truphone - Cheap VoIP calls from your mobile phone over WiFi
Ring Central - Get 800 numbers and virtual PBX with VoIP for calls
Vonage - VoIP phone service target to home users
Fonality - Viritual PBX in a box for small to medium sized enterprises
Virtual PBX - Hosted PBX for small business
Vbuzzer - VoIP software for PC

iPhones Beware of AT&T's 200MB Data Plan

Watch out iPhone users AT&T is at it again trying to rip you off.  Do not sign up for the AT&T Data Plus 200MB monthly data plan because you will likely use this amount of data in the first hour of use if you have a lot of applications running.  Also, as you are driving around in the car Apple and AT&T will not tell you that more that half of the data usage is for data signaling as your phone travels between cell phone towers. It has also been reported that the iPhone FaceTime app uses roughly 3MB of data per minute.  So even if you are not using your phone to do any of the in the chart below you will still be incurring data charges.  Even if you have purchased AT&T's femtocell (Microcell) you will still incur data charges towards your phone usage on the network.  This is also appalling and a rip off as well.  

We recommend sticking with Wi-Fi as long as you can as the big carriers still think they can take advance of the unsophisticated users.  There is still very little transparency and reporting about your data usage and I expect to see many class-action lawsuits as a result.  The monthly bills are starting to come in and if you are not diligent you may find yourself in cell phone billing hell.  These figures above pertain to other smartphones and do not represent normal data usage on iPhones.

How to Get out of a Cellular Service Contract

Are you in a cell phone contract with a carrier that suddenly does not get coverage at your home or office anymore? Have you been told that it will cost you $$$ to terminate your agreement? Well you can get out of your cell phone agreement, legally if the problems are documented. The Material Adverse Clause is a little known part of your cell phone agreement that essentially states that should any terms or conditions change following your signing of the contract, you have a right to terminate without having to pay any Early Termination Fee (ETF).Here’s what to do:

Step 1 - Document legitimate dead zones when making calls with the carrier. When you experience a dead zone, dropped calls or network congestion, the trick is to continue making and calls you know will drop moments later. You will want to accumulate a high number of dropped calls because when you call customer service, and ask to speak to a supervisor, they will have the ability to view your calls and will see that the percentage of dropped calls in relation to total calls made is in fact very high.

Step 2 - Document your dropped calls on DeadCellZones.com by typing in your address or zip code on the map. Add your complaint and view complaints made by other users in your area. Copy (Ctrl + PrtSc) and paste (Ctrl + V) the map so you can send the coverage complaints to your carrier.
Step 3 - Call your cell phone carrier and politely ask to speak to a supervisor (this is a good practice whenever you have a concern and need to contact a company). Refer to your saved bills when speaking with the supervisor and use the term Material Adverse Clause specifically, and refer to the the changes that have occurred in your contract. Tell him/her that you want to cancel your agreement. Should you receive any pushback, remind the supervisor of the Material Adverse Clause and the specific changes in your contract and that should put a quick end to any challenge.

Related Stories: 
How to Drop Early Termination Fees