TXTPower released the following statement regarding the new promo price of P0.50 per text message announced yesterday by President Arroyo in her speech before Congress:
The economist Mrs. Arroyo is trying to cheat the public over the so-called 50 percent reduction in texting rates which she pompously announced in her eighth State of the Nation Address yesterday, according to consumer group TXTPower.
“The truth is, text messages may already cost less than 50 centavos. The forward march of mobile technology and the gigantic profit rates for the past years have lowered the cost of sending text messages to absurdly low levels, far lower than P0.50,” said TXTPower president Anthony Ian Cruz.
Cruz said that “the setting of a price of P1.00 before and P0.50 now, upon the request of Mrs. Arroyo, is obviously arbitrary and does not reflect the real cost of texting.”