Personal Blogs

As an economics student, I have a great many questions about economics, and I am hoping to find some answers over the course of my studies. For example: what was the real cause of the recent economic meltdown? Was it really a meltdown or just part of the normal cyclical way of things? Did quantitative easing make things any better? How do bankers get away with such huge bonuses? Would there have been a crisis in the bond markets if the coalition government hadn't embarked on such an ambitious austerity programme? What would have happened if banks like Northern Rock and RBS had been allowed to fail?

But right now, another question occurs to me: how the actual fuck does the mobile phone industry even survive, let alone manage to spawn companies that generate such obscene profits that they can cheerfully be let off a little matter of £6 billion of unpaid tax, which is presumably considered small change in the context of the profits they make.

This occurs to me because I have just started to contemplate replacing my old steam-powered mobile phone (I can't actually remember how long I've had it, but pretty sure it's at least 5 years) with one of these new-fangled smartphone thingies. I have been astonished at how difficult it is.

The first thing is that there are way too many phones on the market. There are many phone manufacturers, each of whom produces a huge number of almost identical models. How is any ordinary mortal supposed to know which one to buy?

And as far as I can tell, the phones don't even work properly. For example, the iPhone has a well publicised fault which is that it doesn't work if you hold it in your left hand. Apple's response? Don't hold it in your left hand. Why does anyone think that's acceptable? And when I asked some of my Twitter followers for recommendations, someone came back saying she was really pleased with her phone, and the only problem is that it sometimes overheats and has to be rebooted. What on earth must the phones that people aren't pleased with be like?

And then it comes to choosing a network. The mobile phone networks seem to go out of their way to make their charging structure as opaque as possible. They all calculate costs in different ways. Trying to find out, for example, how much it would cost me to use a phone abroad, has defeated me.

And it's not like I'm no good with numbers. I'm a statistician for my day job and I have a PhD and everything.

There's also the problem of reliability of coverage. More often than not, when a friend has been showing off their whizzy new smartphone and tried to demonstrate a feature that required connecting to the internet, the phone was unable to connect. And this is mostly in London, which is hardly a rural backwater. So where am I supposed to get reliable data on network reliability?

Seriously, the whole thing is just so bloody complicated that I am tempted just to give up and stick with my existing phone for a few years more.

How do the phone companies get away with it? The only thing I can think of is that there are huge numbers of people who regard their phone as a fashion accessory, and feel that they always have to have the latest model if they want to look "cool". So they will always pay good money to upgrade to the latest model no matter how much of a pain it is.

So it seems to me that the business model of the entire mobile phone industry is based on fashion. That doesn't sound sensible to me. As anyone old enough to remember flared trousers will know all too well, fashions change.