I got an email from Vonage this week. “we'd like to offer you a 2nd Extension for $4.99 per month (plus taxes). That means you can now extend your home calling plan to yet another phone. Just like with your FREE Extension, there are no more worries about high carrier rates or calling card gimmicks.”
And I thought it is a creative way for them to add new numbers to their network.It vaguely reminded of something similar in the past. This morning, it finally hit me. It was MCI’s Friends and Family plan in the early 90s – where rates were cheaper if both ends of the conversation were MCI customers.
Amazing that 2 decades later the bigger telephone companies are still so over priced on their long distance calls that we seriously consider such promotions.
Then I see this WSJ article on Verizon LTE on the new iPad “Brandon Wells got the new iPad last Friday, started wirelessly streaming March Madness games the next day and by Saturday night was out of gas.” And that gas costs $10 for every extra gigabyte.
Where have we seen that before? Oh yes, just a few years ago, the iPhones severely taxed the AT&T 3G network and led to all kinds of howling around data charges.
Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. How insane are we consumers that we keep signing up with the big telcos over and over and over….
