well written article. much appreciated.

oh please God

me too...

booyah

3? sweet!

Agreed. In my situation, I set my plan at a number of limits that I don't go over. Even if I were spending an extra 15 minutes/month because of these "outrageous" voicemail directions, my bill would reflect no change. In fact, my carrier would be in effect giving me 15 minutes/month they wouldn't otherwise I have (decreasing the carrier's ARPU). I think most people are probably in the same situation.

In an attempt to make sense of the $620M, I have tried to do the math, and it comes out to $0.0000169/minute (with some assumptions). Obviously, if you go over your plan's limit, you spend more than that on overage minutes. Let's say they cost you $0.10/minute. In that case, if 20% of the 70M subscribers would have to get 15 minutes of overage minutes to make up that $620M - doesn't seem all that realistic to me. Throw in prepaid, pay-as-you-go, and tweak the rate, it could be possible.

Another area to check out would be the company's access fees. Maybe they are charging access fees on their network that gives them some sort of incentive to have customers using more minutes. Typically, though, wireless carriers have fought to lower those access fees, because they are usually paying them, so that doesn't seem to make much sense.

I think we should start a massive complaint campaign to Mr. Pogue asking documentation on his numbers. Or somebody could just give him a call...

nice

Yes, please

I'm down

and done