Want to get rid of surprises?

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Tweets or bleats? Tool measures importance on Twit...US election, iPhone among top 10 Internet moments ...Twitter, Facebook 'costing British economy £1.38 b...

: Nowhere is it written in stone that all teenagers must at some point run up their parents’ cellphone bills with 3,000 peak minutes, 5,000 text messages and enough new ring tones to fill the overnight slot on a college radio station.

It only seems that the $400 surprise bill is a rite of passage for every parent naïve enough hand a child “a credit card with an antenna,” as one cellphone network executive describes it. Now, the major cellular networks either feel the parent’s pain or have had enough of parents calling and sharing that pain with customer service representatives.

T-Mobile said it would announce a new service that will give parents a way to control almost every aspect of their children’s cellphone use, except what they say or write in a text message. Verizon said it would soon offer similar services. AT&T Wireless was the first of the four major networks to introduce parental controls when it introduced the “Smart Limits” service last September. For $5 a month, parents can go online to set allowances for text messages, peak calling minutes and money spent on downloadable content.

With AT&T’s plan, parents can restrict which cellphone numbers can be called and limit the times of day the phone can be used for texting, calling or Web surfing. Smart Limits also lets parents block Web content not appropriate for children.

T-Mobile’s new “Family Allowances” service is similar, but the company will charge just $2 a month when it is introduced in August. Compared with AT&T, T-Mobile’s time controls appear to give a parent limited options. They can stop their children from calling friends only during certain blocks of hours, like 9 am to 2 pm. AT&T, meanwhile, allows parents to specify which hours are blacked out.

So what happens to a T-Mobile subscriber if a child’s school schedule doesn’t conform to those hours, or a child needs to arrange a ride home before school ends? Parents can establish a list of numbers that can always be called or reached via text message, like the parents’ own numbers. And 911 calls can always be dialled.

Parents of children who have time management problems may wish they had a way to cap the number of minutes their children use daily, but a slightly cumbersome workaround exists: they can do a little math, log onto T-Mobile’s site every day and add more minutes to their children’s accounts.

Which all sounds like a great way for parents to avoid sticker shock — and perhaps set the stage for a nightly battle with their teenagers over the day’s limits. Maybe so. Whether parents will like the feel of these new reins in their hands is an open question. In a recent Nielsen Online survey, most parents of 8-to-12-year-olds say they don’t use even the rudimentary parental controls offered on phones, like the ability to block calls made to certain numbers.

So why would the carriers introduce these features now? Simple, said Jill Aldort, a marketing analyst with the Yankee Group. The only demographic groups not yet saturated with cellphones, she said, are the very young and the very old.

“The way to get to the parents is to alleviate their concerns about surprisingly high cellphone bills, or their child sitting in math class texting or accessing inappropriate content,” Aldort said. Verizon will help parents curb such activity soon. The company has since last year allowed parents to set limits for the type of content each phone could access. But in August, the carrier will extend that service to include customized time limits like those offered by AT&T and T-Mobile. Parents with Sprint contracts, meanwhile, aren’t completely on their own. On most of the carrier’s phones, subscribers can still block their children’s access to certain Web content, or block all Web pages.

That still leaves a lot of potential for sky-high bills, especially if a teenager is involved in an text-messaging war or cellphone drama.

Sprint suggests that an all-you-can-eat family plan could help in such situations, but those plans can quickly add up for people with large families. And for parents who want to stop their children from texting and surfing through algebra class, such unlimited plans could just aggravate the problem.