Here are the first few paragraphs from a Toronto Star business article.
If you read the article in the Star's on-line archives, it gets even worse as the customer service reps for all the cellular providers tell customers it's a government mandatory charge. Which it's not!
-----------------------
Canada's cellular industry will pocket nearly $1 billion in 2004 from a special systems "access" or "licensing" fee that wireless consumers believe — and are regularly being told — is a mandatory government charge.
Only it isn't mandatory at all, nor, as many are led to believe, is the $6.95 that appears on every mobile phone bill being passed along to a government body, such as Industry Canada or the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
"Nobody is required to charge a $7 access fee," says Ian Angus, a telecommunications consultant and president of Angus TeleManagement Group in Ajax. "It's fake. It's a method of doing a rate increase that doesn't look like a rate increase."
If you read the article in the Star's on-line archives, it gets even worse as the customer service reps for all the cellular providers tell customers it's a government mandatory charge. Which it's not!
-----------------------
Canada's cellular industry will pocket nearly $1 billion in 2004 from a special systems "access" or "licensing" fee that wireless consumers believe — and are regularly being told — is a mandatory government charge.
Only it isn't mandatory at all, nor, as many are led to believe, is the $6.95 that appears on every mobile phone bill being passed along to a government body, such as Industry Canada or the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
"Nobody is required to charge a $7 access fee," says Ian Angus, a telecommunications consultant and president of Angus TeleManagement Group in Ajax. "It's fake. It's a method of doing a rate increase that doesn't look like a rate increase."
