A price-comparison website has claimed that US consumers pay an average of US$336 per year, too much for their cell phone service, by miscalculating their use of voice minutes, texts and data. It was found that people are more likely to overestimate their anytime minutes and texts, but underestimate their data usage.
Consumers are therefore purchasing wireless plans that don’t actually fit their needs and in doing so, are giving an estimated extra $79 million to wireless companies each year.
The company claims that the discrepancy likely stems from opaque bills, where vague fees get buried within utilization breakdowns.
According to sources, despite the best efforts from the FCC and the carriers to create transparency in wireless fees, they’ve found that people are becoming even more confused about how to right-size their cell phone plans. While tiered pricing creates more choice, it makes it paramount for people to accurately assess their phone usage. Even though data usage is surging, the majority of wireless customers are still throwing away money by getting plans with too much data capacity.
As per studies conducted from December 2009 to December 2010, it was found that more than 230,000 individuals are seeking advice on wireless plans. They found that over that time frame, anytime minutes increased by 229% over the last year (from 193 minutes in 2009 to 634 minutes in 2010), while text message usage increased by 170% over the last year (from 660 messages in 2009 to 1782 messages in 2010).
Less surprising, thanks to the rise in smartphone sales, is that the data usage increased by 94% over the last year (from 64 MB in 2009 to 124 MB in 2010). However, people assume that they need 54MB of data per month,but they are actually using 81MB, which is still considerably less than the current tiered data options which start at 150 MB.
While most people pay too much upfront by overestimating their need for voice and text messages, their underestimates on mobile data use leave them open to excess usage fees afterwards.