Jim Prentice asks to meet with CEOs of Telus, Bell over ‘ill-thought-out’ plan to charge for incoming text messages
Fiona Anderson
Sun
Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice has publicly taken Telus Corp. and its rival Bell Mobility to task for making customers pay for incoming text messages.
Under current wireless plans, pay-per-use customers are charged for outgoing messages only. But on Monday, Telus and Bell Mobility, a division of BCE Inc., both revealed plans to charge 15 cents for incoming messages starting in August.
In a statement released Wednesday, Prentice said he had sent letters to the CEOs of both companies asking them to meet with him to explain the new pricing structure.
“While I have no desire to interfere with the day-to-day business decisions of two private companies, I do have a duty as minister of industry, when necessary, to protect the interests of the consuming public,” Prentice said in the statement.
“I believe this was an ill-thought-out decision,” he added.
Prentice said the decision to charge for incoming messages had raised serious consumer concerns, particularly with regard to unwanted, unsolicited spam messages. The minister hoped his meetings with the CEOs would find “a solution that provides the best service to consumers at the best price.”
Bell will begin charging the fee Aug. 8 with Telus customers having until Aug. 24 before being faced with the new charge. Rogers Communications Inc., Canada‘s largest wireless provider, says it has no plans to charge a similar fee. Rogers is facing its own customer backlash over pricing for the new iPhone, which is being released Friday.
Yet Bell and Telus customers who don’t like the new charge may not be able to avoid paying it. Even with pay-per-use plans, some contracts are expensive to cancel, with penalties of up to $400, said Michael Janigan, executive director and general counsel of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.
So the only option for many will be to buy a data plan that includes unlimited text messages or pay the fee, even for unwanted messages such as spam, he said.
“That doesn’t seem to be appropriate,” Janigan said. “If they’re choosing to introduce something that looks like a material change in the arrangements between the parties then [customers] should at least have the option whether they want to stick with that company or not.”
“What they are effectively trying to do is to strong-arm the purchase of a data package because people are going to be scared they are going to be inundated with text messages for which they ought to pay,” Janigan added.
Telus and Bell have blamed increased text messaging, which is now up to 45 million messages a day, for the fee.
But wireless technology expert Ken Chase doesn’t accept that rationale. The consultant with the Toronto-based firm Heavy Computing said that while 45 million text messages sent daily sounds like a lot, the amount of space this takes up on a network and related costs to a telecom company are minuscule.
A text message sent via mobile phone can be no more than 160 characters, and each character is about a byte. If 45 million text messages are sent throughout Canada every day and each message is about 100 characters, this totals 4.5 gigabytes, he said. This amounts to about the same amount of gigabytes required to download two or three high-resolution movies from the Internet.
Telus had no comment on the industry minister’s statement.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
