Cellphone Users to Get Billing Alerts Under New Voluntary Standards [telecom]

After reading some of the "horror" stories about consumers' reactions to the receipt of extremely large ($$) cell phone bills for excessive usage, it struck me that it seems from this article that the cell phone industry might be dragging its heels just a bit as they announced that the proposed alerts will take as much as a year (or two depending how the alert is "broadcast") to implement.

My carrier, Verizon Wireless, has (almost - depending, I've observed, the time of the week) real-time information about data, number of calls and texting usage available either on the their website where I'm registered to pay my bill or via the #DATA or #MIN dial-up's on my cell phone where a (free) text message indicates current cumulative usage.

Since this info seems to be available now, it is strange that it will take a year (or two) to get an alert system setup to forward this info automatically to the customer when some, yet to be determined, threshold is reached.

Also not clear in this proposed alert is in the case of a under-aged (a minor) user under his/her parent(s) family plan, whether the master cell number will receive all plan user alerts, or just the (under-aged) user (who might not pay attention to the alert)(?) Of course I'm assuming that the younger users will creat the heaviest volume of the cell phone plan members.

Perhaps if not, as in this case, industry "voluntary" but the FCC or one of the other government commissions had ordered this alert system be setup, it might get implemented faster.

A year (or two) away applicaton will surely result in many more of these huge bills to suddenly appear, with no warnings, in consumers' mail boxes.

John

My Virgin Mobile Canada (100% owned by Bell Canada now) account sends me a text (free to receive) when my texting, long distance, or extra minutes use has run down my pay as you go account balance the point where it needs to be topped up. I would be surprised if just about all prepaid carriers didn't have something like that implemented to ensure that customers keep using- and keep paying for - their phone service. But because this service helps the customer avoid paying more, they drag their feet.