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There seems to be no end of complaints about wireless service, and those complaints are not limited to the worst or most notorious problems, like AT&T’s famous problems supporting Apple’s iPhone.

Every time we take our cell phone out of our pocket or purse and make a cellular call, we are at the mercy of a complex jumble of hardware and software used by cellular service providers to connect our calls, hold onto them, and give us an opportunity to have a flawless mobile phone experience. Very often, that is what happens. More frequently than we would like, however, our cell phone can’t find a tower with an available node, the call fails while dialing, the call is dropped in the middle, we can’t hear the other party or they can’t hear us, or the voices on both ends fade in and out like we’re trying to talk over a gale wind.

When that happens, we complain (of course), but in truth we actually have no right (at least no legal right) to complain about ill cell-phone fortunes. Just as was true when Ma Bell was the only carrier and land lines were the way telephone was done, the company that handles your calls has no obligation to give you a good experience, of to even connect you to the party with whom you would like to speak, to paraphrase an old Laugh In line. Instead, the only obligation the carriers have, and therefore the only right that you have, is to make an attempt to connect you to your putative conversational partner.

As noted in a Post-Gazette story, you don’t have any other rights (other than to a readable bill) and your carrier has no other responsibilities. Consumer activists have tried to get a Cellular Bill of Rights passed almost since the inception of mobile telephony. No one has ever been successful in getting such a document or law past the extremely powerful wireless carriers lobby. So, until you can muster the power to influence lawmakers as much as the lobbyists do, you have no actual right to complain about cellular service. Perhaps we should start to gather some power in numbers to change that.