Cheaper cell services exist

I remember reading about worker owner co-ops in some early Permaculture text, it might have been Bill Mollison.  This was years ago, I don’t remember much more than that, just that it struck me that a format for a business could apply Permaculture principles.

Recently, I learned about a forming worker-owner cooperative for cell phone service, also owned by members. It will open once they have enough member owners, and you could pay as little as $15 a month for a cell phone with minimal service.

telling people about this co-op led me to hear about other companies that I hadn’t known about, one which is reputable as being very reliable, but is more targeted to senior citizens, and another one which is somewhat unreliable in terms of the set up, and has no customer service, repeatedly. So it’s a gamble, but if you do manage to get it to work, it’s about as inexpensive. I can share the names of the companies if anyone wants to know, but I’m not trying to advertise specific companies, just to say there’s resources I learned about that I had never thought to look for because I assumed that there was no way to save money in this area.

I like the coop model especially — the idea of keeping our money within the local region, analogous to soaking, spreading, and storing water that rains on the landscape.

I had no idea how much of the money that I’ve paid to a big four telephone company each month is just going to shareholders, rather than the actual cost of the service, and it makes more sense to me to have the feedback mechanism stay local.

I think it’s really neat that worker owner coops are starting to form in areas where they haven’t previously existed in America, in film distribution, filmmaking, and there was even a proposal for collective ownership of Spirit Airlines! It got a lot of money pledged to it.

The cost is just having to be involved a little bit, a yearly members meeting. The benefit is considerable when people cooperate.

Thoughts?

I think that so many such companies fly under the radar says a lot about how dependent on advertising modern life has become.

For many people, there is no other way to become aware of products and services other than advertising or their friends...who similarly depend on advertising.

Perhaps it has always been that way. Stands to reason that it would.

Search engines and social media both proposed solutions to this problem and both became completely overtaken by advertising to the destruction of their original business model.

That’s true, and it’s also just something I never thought to do a web search for. There are a lot of of these small companies that fly under the radar.

One of the hurdles is that they’re not allowed to say which networks towers they are operating on, so people just have to know I guess. For example, the cooperative runs its network on the towers of one of the big four companies, but it seems they aren’t allowed to put a service map up on there website. I’m not sure that’s accurate, but they don’t have a map on there at this time as far as I know. And they’re not allowed to say which company they have the towers on.