by Jack Roviere

Created on: July 23, 2008

Long service contracts?! What a pain! Why would any free person who enjoys liberty and justice and all those good things ever want a long service contract?

I've thought about this insufferable tragedy before and I've wondered how it ever could have arisen. I was curious, so I investigated. I wanted to look at the situation from an alternative perspective. So my question now was: what would a world without long service contracts be like? After investigation (just to give a sneak peak of what is to come), I came to the conclusion that our long service contracts are actually reasonable and logical - to a point.

Back to the investigation, I found that many people and nations already prefer not to use long service contracts, so there already is a world where long service contracts, cancellation fees, and their associated evils are looked down upon at the least and are banned at the harshest. Many carriers in continental Europe or in Asia are much more flexible with their plan structures, so what do people living there do instead?

It seemed that many people were very fond of pay-as-you-go or prepaid mobile plans. They could get a certain amount of minutes to their SIM card, pop it in their phones and be on their way with however many minutes they could choose to use. This option seemed particularly attractive to me...especially for people who travel, it's very easy to get a global SIM that will work cheaply in many areas (and because SIM is standardized under GSM technology, it is generally guaranteed to work in any phone - as a plus, Europe and Asia tend to also use the same bands for cell phone communication, so signal strength is not a problem.) People can easily track their voice minute use and curb excessive use (when they are out of minutes...their carrier does not accidentally allow them to overuse and draw overuse charges), and people can flexibly change the features they want on the fly.

So...why not use this in America? I found that...actually...most carriers in America also do provide pay-as-you-go plans. However, these plans are often proprietary (such as AT&T's GoPhone system, Sprint/Nextel's Boost Mobile, etc.,) and are limited to particular low level phones. These phones and their SIMs are then limited so that they cannot be easily used with other networks. However, America's cell network already works prohibitively in this fashion: first of all, only AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM which has SIM, but even then, AT&T and T-Mobile tend to use different communication

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