It also suggests that the NYT intern that wrote this has very little idea about phone companies.

>DOUBLE BILLING In Europe calls to cell phones (from landlines) cost the caller 5-10x as much as calls to another landline - local calls on landlines aren't free. Because of this cell phones have special numbers so the caller knows it's a cell phone. So you can't have a cell phone with a local exchange number. Which means you don;t have the wholesale replacement of home phones with cell phones in europe. Many people there are campaigning for the US system of cell phone owner pays.

INTERNATIONAL CALLS: The reason your call to Greenland costs $3/min is that the Greenland state telephone company is charging them this. It's also the reason that calls to say the UK cost less than to geographically closer countries in S America and why calls to the 3rd world cost a fortune. For a lot of countries 'settlement charges' are their main source of hard currency.

THE SUBSIDY GAME Have they not heard of interest? Of return on investment? Perhaps not, perhaps they built a new office block in NY because they assumed they simply paid back a fraction of the cost each month until the capital was repaid.

I don't know anyone in Europe who'd like the US system of cell phone owner pays. In fact, quite the opposite: I imagine everyone I know, without exception, would hate it.

"Many people there are campaigning for the US system of cell phone owner pays."

Certainly in Australia - which has the "rest of the world" system - I haven't heard people arguing for double billing.

Open Question to HN: How would you go about making a cellphone company that could both make a good network and not treat its customers terribly?

You need spectrum. Those with spectrum have all the power and can do essentially whatever they want. The FCC could step in and regulate this or that but I wouldn't count on that happening too soon.

This is why it's a shame that Google didn't go for a win in the wireless spectrum last year. $5 bn would have been worth it and put Android on a whole other level, IMHO. Maybe they were worried about anti-trust scrutiny.

Relatedly, how is it that cell phone companies screw their customers at every turn and still have single-digit profit margins? Given the amount of malice we perceive in them (and they make me as angry as the next guy), you'd think they were making far more.

The most interesting thing about this article to me is that the author has linked to another site using a visible bit.ly link -- literally "One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated...". It suggests some disconnect between the NYTimes journalist and the technology he's using.

we do that at my newspaper because it's an easy way to track outbound links. sure we could set up our own outbound redirection thingy, but bit.ly is les cool and we have other things to work on.

You could also use awe.sm to set up a redirector on a domain of your choice, which is pretty cheap and looks more professional than a generic shortener (disclosure: I know the founder).

Although I think it's a good thing for congress to help us out with things like this every now and then, the author's list of gripes are a bit much. I think congress has better things to do.