According to Gizmodo, David Pogue from the New York Times is up in arms against wireless carriers. The reason for his ire is that wireless carriers purposely include long voicemail messages that are designed to waste time and money so that the companies can generate revenue out of it.
The messages commonly go like this. At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep) This message costs about 15 seconds of users’ time.
Wireless Carriers make a lot of money out of this. For instance, Verizon Wireless makes about $620 million annually, if its 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday. Moreover, when the time spent on listening to these messages is added up it amounts to three hours of users’ precious time every year.
A couple of years before, David Pogue had attended an international cellular conference in Italy. He discovered that companies have the voicemail instructions because they want users to use up airtime so that ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) increases.
In order to remedy the situation, Pogue has provided links to four major carriers where users can place their complaints.