Digital Journal — Hey dawgs! Y’all seen that dope MySolo site? It be ill, y’know what I’m sayin’? It’s all that!
Actually, what I’m trying to say is that the marketeers at Bell designed a website for their pay-as-you go cell phone that is so palpably youth-oriented, it forced me to fire up Google and find an online hip-hop dictionary. I wanted to pick just the right words to describe it for what I’m guessing is the target audience. If I failed, sue me. Or diss me. Or something like that.
Anyway, what’s with the all-singing, all-dancing website that is mysolo.ca? It’s a little virtual world unto itself, built for the gaming generation. You got King Kong swatting at flying cell phones. You got people bowing before a giant cell-phone idol. You got a compass — click it; it takes you to the store locator section! Get it? There’s this one weird tower that looks vaguely like stacked Tupperware with a set of clacking teeth stuck in the middle. Encased in the top bowl is a pink brain. Clicking on it takes you to the students page, where Bell offers to de-stress their lives by helping them book cell phones up to three months in advance of school starting. What a thoughtful company!
Click through the Solo Wireless link and you’re first escorted to an array of shiny, pretty cell phones, then to the rate plan. Here’s what the introductory paragraph says: “Have total control of your cellular costs. Every time you use your phone (making and receiving calls, using features) you use up airtime. Solo let’s [sic] you pay for service when you use it, giving you complete control over your wireless costs.”
Complete control?! Really?!?!
Well, not really.
It’s true that with a regular cell plan, you essentially buy a contract for X months at Y minutes per month. Even if you don’t use it at all, you still pay for Y. What the website doesn’t tell you is that Solo is also a use-it-or-lose-it type of business.
For example, you buy a card that provides $50 worth of airtime. You use five bucks’ worth on Day One, and having unfortunately used that to alienate both those people who care about you, there’s no one else to call for the next 59 days. If you put another $10 or so into your plan on the 60th day, you carry over the $45 worth of minutes you didn’t use — but only for 30 days. However, if you didn’t put more money in, you forfeit the $45 surplus.
So it’s simple: Put money in forever, and you’re cool with Solo. If you don’t, then in the above example, you’ve just paid 10 times what you should have for airtime. Sound like complete control to you?
Seems to me like Solo is in complete control, but what do I know? I don’t even have a decent grasp of hip-hop slang.
This pre-paid thang didn’t seem like such a great deal to me, so I picked up my landline and called Bell Mobility, where I reached a very pleasant and helpful young woman named Eva. I asked her why anybody would bother with a pre-paid cell phone, given what appear to be some obvious drawbacks.
She said there are some who only need a phone for a short period of time. People have been known to pick up a Solo just to last them on a vacation. Others who don’t use their cell phone very much — say 10 or 20 minutes per month — can control their costs better with a pre-paid account.
Then she said there are some people who don’t have a credit history or who otherwise don’t qualify for a regular cell plan, making the pre-paid option the right one for them. Can you say “student”?
Asked why the money would be lost, Eva said, “Well, for particular denominations, you have a time period to use those minutes.” Sadly, when I asked how much Bell might collect from pre-paid accounts that had gone past their best-before date, she only said, “Good question,” adding that she didn’t have that information available to her.
I’ve been picking on Bell’s MySolo, but it’s fundamentally the same deal at other companies, like Rogers, Telus, Clearnet and Fido.
As a consumer, the lesson you should take from this story is to go into these plans with your eyes wide open. They offer the opportunity to save some cash, but only if you’re disciplined. The simplest way is to not buy a whack of airtime in advance if you’re not going to use it.
Otherwise, think of those teeth in the MySolo Tupperware tower as gobbling up your money.
