Extract from Nic Cicutti’s 12 December 2007
“Many customers are angry that their existing supplier can take days to provide their telephone number to the new network before they can change. The delay is used by networks to try to persuade customers to stay. Some argue that airtime providers actually try to frustrate the switch in the hope of making customers stay put.”
Mr Cicutti is being diplomatic when he uses the word “Some… argue that airtime…”
I started my career in stockbroking in the City of London in the late sixties. The mobile networks individually and as a sector have had the very worst business practices of so called reputable companies that I can remember in the whole of my life. Now they just stink as a sector and individually some stink more than others.
The worst thing that ever happened to customers was inadvertently perpetrated by your friend and mine the Prime Minister. As Chancellor he catapulted a fledgling crummy sector into an allegedly cynical cartel, which somehow managed to remain legal, determined to recover that portion of the £22 billion they felt the then Chancellor’s boffin had overcharged them in the 3G licence auction. That these sheep all had to overpay rather than be left out and face criticism for not being a sheep is similar to the principal of one in all in with the sub prime crisis. It’s just too risky for fat cats to think for themselves – as long as they all make the same mistake, no problémo!
So post the £22 billion the sector set about providing roughly the same high, by international standards as I recall, rates for airtime and texts until in the latter case the Daily Mail did a front page on rip off text prices and strangely enough prices then started to tumble – the Mail must have been clairvoyant.
I wrote to the Office of Charles Dunstone of CPW a few years ago asking why I couldn’t buy just contract airtime as I didn’t need a phone. To my astonishment the reply was that the networks insisted on a phone being included with every contract. Not very green and surely the networks acting as a cartel? Apparently not but surely the Government would step in and stop this practice. Hey Chancellor over here sir. Can you stop the mobile companies being alleged cartels? Oh please sir, say you will… Oh sir please say something… Oh sir you’ve dropped something… Oh it’s a er… £22 billion note.
My uncensored comment on mobile networks? UNPRINTABLE!