Wanted: a Rosetta stone for smartphone plans.
The Rosetta stone, you may remember, was a stone found by a French soldier toward the end of the 18th century that proved to be the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphs because it was engraved with both those ancient Egyptian symbols — which scholars did not yet understand — and Greek, which they understood perfectly well.
For consumers trying to understand the difference between one phone plan and another, from one carrier or another, those plans might as well be written in some untranslatable language. The real confusion, Brian X. Chen writes in this week’s Tech Fix column, began when T-Mobile said it was going to drop two-year plans in an effort to make them “cheaper and more transparent” by eliminating things like those pesky termination fees. The idea was, believe it or not, to simplify things.
That set off a chain reaction among all the other major carriers and takes us to where we are today, with a dizzying array of regularly changing plans, fees and even definitions. There are bargains and decided nonbargains, and consumer advocates say there is no one-size-fits-all plan. For consumers, that means homework, figuring out what deal best fits an individual or family, and even learning which carrier has the best local coverage.
Simple? Not yet.