Two's company, Three's unbowed: You Brits will pay more for MMS snaps Mobile operator Three UK is celebrating the approach of British summer by, er, hiking its charges for some of its services. A reader tipped off The Register to the changes at the CK Hutchison subsidiary, which will hit customers who go outside their allowance or who fancy a play on some of Three's additional services. The …
"We don't consider the increase in the cost of Outside of Allowance calls to be a materially detrimental change to your contract," Three offered.
Yeah? Well I'm making a counteroffer that reduces the cost of my Outside of Allowance calls to zero pence per minute. I don't consider that to be a materially detrimental change to Three either. Continuation of service after receiving notice posted to their head office will constitute acceptance of my terms.
"It does seem a peculiar position to take,"
Not when you look at the legal position. If it's a "material" change to the contract then the customers have the right to cancel without penalty. But the law doesn't define what a "material" change is and so it's open to "opinion". They're betting, with good odds of winning, that no one will challenge their "opinion" that it's not a "material" change. By challenge, I mean in a court of law.
Standard corporate practice. Keep pushing the boundaries until challenged. "Pay off" the challengers with deals or out of court settlements or, if deluged with challenges, back down. At all costs, avoid a legal ruling so you can try it on again with variations next time around.
Which forces a depressing thought. There are suits who deliberately and openly ( at least with each other) are prepared to sit in a meeting and decide to behave in a way that almost all normal ( however that is defined) people would consider outrageously dishonest and disreputable. And somehow these parasites are able to sleep at night, presumably not seeing themselves as being little different from smugglers or fraudsters, other than that the law hasn't found a way to stop them yet. And that these are not even particularly exceptional since Bhopal, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, subprime loans, Tesco's accounting issues, the Ford Pinto and so on seem to suggest that they're all at it in their corporate office towers.
The 'no tethering' clause that these telcos put on really grinds my gears. If they are advertising I can have x amount of data allowance it shouldn't make a difference how i choose to use it.
I remember reading up that their are ways around them detecting your tethering anyway, I think if your using some tethering apps rather than the built in tethering they can't detect that. I guess another way is to route all outgoing traffic from your phone through a VPN so then they couldn't see what devices are accessing the internet.
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