Editor’s Note: Each year, RCR Wireless News chooses the person who has most impacted the wireless industry. Our choice for 2003 is the consumer, the collective 150 million wireless subscribers who are changing the wireless industry with both their praises and their complaints.
The mobile-phone industry in 2003 found itself face to face with the same mighty force that had made it one of the greatest success stories in American business—the consumer.
The wireless consumer—more than 150 million strong in the United States—was angry. Actually, mad as hell.
The rising tide of complaints about service quality, billing, contracts, customer service, marketing and business practices down the line—from coast to coast—had reached a critical mass right as industry reached its 20th birthday.
A celebration it wasn’t in 2003.
The consumer screamed bloody murder. The bellyaching was heard by Congress, state attorneys general, and state public utility commissions and consumer activists around the country. They began to act. Trial lawyers quickly caught on.
Industry had a big problem on its hands, one that in its totality and long-term implications was far greater than implementing local number portability or enhanced 911 or disability accessibility or any other federal mandate decried by industry. The consumer backlash even eclipsed industry’s fight for legislation to secure military frequencies for third-generation wireless systems.
That the wayward wireless market improved this year and companies escaped relatively unscathed from the government crackdown on accounting fraud were of little consequence.
The angry consumer was still there, demanding satisfaction. And not budging an inch.
The consumer—more so than any other factor—fundamentally changed industry behavior in 2003. And it’s not over.
In 2003, scores of consumer lawsuits were in the pipeline in states everywhere and more being prepared. The California Public Utilities Commission—led by a former steel-mill worker and union sympathizer named Carl Wood—was advancing a bill of rights for telecom consumers that threatened to become a template for state regulators throughout the land.
The quake was felt all the way back East, so much so that the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association took the unprecedented step of steering more than $200,000 to lawyers and lobbyists in San Francisco in hopes of derailing the Wood initiative.
“My background is not as a businessman. It’s as a worker. I think my tendency is to approach this thing as a working person,” said Wood.
Wood harbors no illusions. “The leadership in the cell-phone industry doesn’t like me a lot,” he said. “It’s very clear they wish I’d go away.”
The full version of this story is available to paid subscribers of RCR Wireless News at The Year of the Consumer.
