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The power to communicate comes with a hefty price tag nowadays.

I'm a subscriber of this telecom who promises to make great things possible. True enough, impossible things showed up on my phone bills. Like downloads I've never even seen were charged to me. In my previous bills, the charges were negligible as two downloads are not worth lining up in the customer service. After I paid my 85th bill with sixty downloads, I just had to find out what they are.

I suspect those annoying SMS invitations from people wanting be your friends were deliberately programmed as if you are the one messaging them. You just get charged whether you say yes, no or ignore them. The phone company doesn't acknowledge that those solicitations come from them. Prepaid users end up spending more because they do not have proof where their phone credits went. For a telecom business, it really is profitable considering people pay you in advance for your service interest-free and probably VAT-free, too.

I've bought handsets for my mom and my staff but I've never bought a handset for myself. In fact, I'm still comfortable using my hand-me-down handset from my sister who passed it on to me seven years ago. My friends and staff look at me as if I belong in another era. Lately, I'm preparing for the inevitable. My phone is getting senile, with an on and off memory, as it searches for my SIM when in fact it's still in there. I have this habit of using gadgets until they die of old age or exhaustion.

With a myriad of handsets to choose from, I still prefer a compact phone that I can access numbers without having to go through a lot of icons and loading time. Carrying a mobile phone is for my own convenience. My phone is always on a silent mode and sometimes I cannot be reached. When I go to sleep, so does my phone.

I asked my bank manager if she ever turns her company issued phone off. As a rule, if she cannot be reached, it means she's at home and she doesn't want the headquarters to think that she's always at home so her phone is on 24/7. I told her it's a tracking device. She laughed and said that headquarters can check her whereabouts with the built-in map of Cebu. Why on earth would you allow someone to keep track of you 24/7? Being wireless sounds liberating but are you really free?

Wireless technology is supposed to help us make sound decisions because information is right at our fingertips in an instant. Companies invest in video conferencing to cut down travel time, save fuel and the environment and hopefully, be more productive.

Relationships blossom through messaging and Internet. It's another platform for virtual social gathering. A haven for introverts, I suppose. This doesn't mean that we're excused from human contact just because we can communicate without being actually there.

Where is all this technology leading the subscribers to? The advancement of wireless systems, telecom firms are investing in other platforms to eliminate high costs of building and maintaining their current line-of-sight and satellite technology used for 2G (voice and SMS) and 3G (wider bandwidth for data transfer) services. With 4G technologies, subscribers can help deploy the network for the carrier by subsidizing the cost of infrastructure through user devices like laptops or handsets, which translates into spending more for handheld devices to accommodate more data and hopefully less congestion.

This fascination of going wireless is tantamount to wearing a strapless bra. Bottom line is, we're paying for convenience and mobility. Isn't it easy nowadays to organize a coup, to threat prosecutors, to crash a plane, to arrange a blind date, or to say how much you love someone with the click of a button? Imagine a community of people from a remote area bypassing copper wire communication and going wireless and digital at once? With all the electromagnetic forces we're carrying in our bodies, no wonder our system goes haywire and we deteriorate at the speed of advancement. I wonder if those Teslar watches really protect you from EMF?

Celebrated inventor and science fiction author Sir Arthur C. Clarke once said, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Meanwhile, the subscriber cannot be rich, please try again later.

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