Canadian Cellphone Users May Get Justice Over Phantom Charges 91
An anonymous reader writes "For years, Bell Mobility customers in northern Canada were charged 75 cents a month for 911 emergency service. The problem is that cellphone users outside Whitehorse, Yukon, don't have access to 911 service. The Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories ruled against Bell this week, following a class action lawsuit which challenged the phantom cellphone 911 billings. Subject to a possible final appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, Bell will likely owe 30,000 northern cellphone subscribers some bucks."
So many extra fees (Score:5, Informative)
Bell is horrible for the extra fees.
On my Landline, I have a 911 fee, I have a network access fee and I have a touch tone fee.
Yes a Touch Tone fee. Bell Canada has not moved the extra fee for touch tone service into their service packages. I cannot get a new pulse line, nor can I have touch tone removed from my line. There are customers who still had only pulse and so they did not get charged this fee, but you had to actively refuse touch tone service when it was being rolled out. This was ~25 years ago.
911 fee is from when 911 was being rolled out and was mandated by law. Bell put the fee there to show that it was required by law and that's why your bill was higher than before. This was 15-20 years ago.
The network access fee is the fee for Bell Canada to connect to it's own network. This was from when their monopoly was dismantled and 3rd parties were given access to their lines. Bell Canada's end user arm had to pay for access to their network. So they put in the fee to explain why the bill was higher. This also was 15-20 years ago.
You give Bell a reason to put in an extra fee, they'll take it and never give it back, no matter how unnecessary it has become.
Uh... Bell IS a monoploy (Score:5, Informative)
While they're slowly losing to cell phone companies and such, the Bell company in question DOES have a legal monopoly on the land line system in the area. Given that things like the 'touch tone' fee are known to piss people off, it's probably because they're regulated on what they can charge as part of the 'basic fee', having to go before a board or whatever to get that increased. Meanwhile, with sufficient justification they can add a fee, but no regulatory structure to REMOVE said fees, thus the continuation of them long past when it made sense.
Sort of like how we had a tax here in the USA meant to pay for the last spanish-american war* that was finally ended less than a decade ago. Or how tolls will go up to 'pay for the construction' of some road or bridge, but never get taken down, even after all the construction costs have been recouped several times over.
*Which a lot of US history student don't even know about.