July 16, 2004
Few answer call for Italian cell phone strike
After the Lebanese cell phone strike mentioned earlier, here's news on Italy's.
Italians are used to strikes. But the strike call for Thursday might have gone too far when consumer groups urged Italians to give up something they clearly can't live without, their mobile phones, according to MSNBC.
"For the first time, a federation of consumer rights' associations asked Italians to switch off their cell phones for two hours.
The purpose of the boycott was to give a wake-up call to telephone companies by highlighting anger over increased call charges, rising costs of text messaging, the influx of spam in phone inboxes and confusion over how fees are applied for international calls.
According to a recent survey, Italy is the biggest consumer of mobile phones in Europe, with 57 million wireless numbers now active. Statistically speaking, that means there is a mobile phone for every Italian.
If every cell phone user stopped making calls for two hours, the organizers calculated that the loss in profit would be approximately $620 million. In other words, the more silent Italians could be, the louder their message.
Italians, though, didn't seem to be listening. Just after midday, the time the boycott started, the polyphonic tunes were still ringing loudly in St. Peter's Square in Rome.
cf previous post on cell phone strike in Italy as well as related articles on other (outrageous) pricing issues around the world.
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