DSL Reports: AT&T Caps Have Arrived [telecom]

Aside from my general "this is ugly and wrong and f'ed up" reaction, there's the related issue that each time you pull up a web page, you're "treated" to oodles and oodles of third party advertising (and worse) that eats away at your bucket of bytes.

Admittedely it's "just" a small percentage of your total, but that's like saying those spam phone calls to your cellular [a] are only using a few of your minutes.

In other words, Mrs. Lincoln, aside from that little incident, how was the play?

[a] of course if you're on a pre-pay-by-the-minute account you're hit each and every time. Same for email/sms text spam.

That's where European operators treat their clients much nicer

-- inbound calls and inbound messages arrive at no charge to the recipient (in the case of the Polish operators Orange and Play, in fact, even after your starter SIM's stored value has gone to zero, you can receive for at least a year from your SIM's date of first use).

Cheers, -- tlvp

On Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:58:34 -0400, tlvp wrote: .........

Same as Australia, I used to have a very cheap pre-paid SIM that I rarely made outgoing calls on and it basically cost me $30 a year for a number that I could receive incoming calls.

Let's not get into the old saw of "their system is better than ours." In Europe and other countries where the subscriber doesn't pay to receive calls the calls are not free. The initiator of the call pays for all call charges and always at a non-negotiated rate. Whatever the tariff is that's what the caller pays and very often at a rate that's even higher than an international call to a regular number. Most people in North America get calling plans that give them a surfeit of available minutes or get a plan that gives them enough minutes that they can make just necessary calls.

I would think caller pays would severly restrict the usefulness of a cellphone. [Who] would pay to call their plumber, electrician or whatever if they only list a cellnumber? I notice quite a few commercial vehicles now that list only a number I recognize as a cell number. Most landline service in the U.S.A. is flat rate, so there is no marginal cost for making a call to a land line or to a cell number...in many cases the caller doesn't know which he or she is calling.

And, as you note, most cell phone users have more minutes than they use, so there is no marginal cost there, either.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Per Wes Leatherock:

+1 on that.

On one hand it would impede the conduct of business.

OTOH, maybe Americans work too hard and basically cutting off their cell phones' incoming would give us a break.

Also, there would seem tb the issue of callers not knowing what they are getting in to price-wise - unless there's something about cell phone numbers in Europe that makes them instantly identifiable.

there are tradeoffs.

with caller pays countries tend to have reserved number ranges for types of call - eg in the UK all mobiles begin 07.

- so you know what your cost of call is likely to be.

- it make free call, geographic independent numbers and low cost call services more common here.

The flip side is calls to a subscriber are paid for by the caller - so i dont get to pay to recieve a mobile call from some person in a call centre i dont want to talk to........

Plenty of fixed price / bundle minute deal here, initally mainly on mobiles. Bundles for landlines are normally limited to national fixed line + international calls.

It seems to work quite well in Australia, there was initial resistance when people started doing this sort of thing but they have adapted.

One big advantage of callers paying when calling tradesman is that they are more concise when they [are] paying the meter....

Per Stephen:

- It would mean the end of the spam/telephone solicitor calls that my cell phone has been getting more and more of as the bottom feeders move offshore and hide behind VOIP providers.

Nope

even with cheap labour it looks like the telephony charges are only a small part of the running costs - otherwise i would not get so many spam calls.....