Advice for calling US Mobile Phone?

Mark,

You've had many good suggestions. Just another idea, if you both have internet connections (and there are many hotspots and other options in US). CamTrek,

All the best, CT

my mate took his $40/month landline out and now only has VoIP over his cable broadband. Transferred the same number to the VoIP.

depends what you include in "mobile prices". My mate couldn't get the phone I have for free (from Orange on a 120 minute tariff) without paying about $400 for it. So that's about $35/month to add on.

I couldn't be doing with their f***ed up "you can only have this plan in this ZIP code" mentality either.

Virgin mobile comparison:- Calls cost 15p a minute for the first five minutes of calls each day and 5p after that Calls are 25 cents a minute for the first ten minutes each day, and then just 10 cents a minute for the rest of the day.

doesn't suggest any massive discepancy.

Phil

You can do the same in the UK - after all VOIP will work the same anywhere in the world if you've got broadband.

Yup - termination premiums do go some way towards subsiding phones.

That's calls *from* mobiles. It's calls *to* mobiles which are much more expensive in the UK.

-- Andy

indeed

Calls *to* mobiles *from* landlines. On the Virgin US tariff you'll be paying 25 cents/minute for the first incoming :-(

Phil

It isn't so there's no point in moaning over it is there? There's no point in debating that caller pays is superior to called party pays either. They are what they are and they're not going to change so why have a jihad about it?!

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And to mobiles from other mobile operators. The UK Virgin tariff you quoted won't include calls to Vodafones/Orange etc. These will be much more expensive.

But calling other mobiles will be the standard price.

Preferably one on the same network. That's why I think mobile operators shouldn't be allow to have restrictive T&C's, so any tariff available to the public is also available to other telcos. So discount telcos like 1899 could buy lots of high user tariffs and use them to route calls - thereby avoiding the rip-off termination premiums.

-- Andy

Aw, c'mon. GSM has nothing to do with who pays for the call. Cingular and T-Mobile both use GSM in the US, and it's charged the same way as any other US phone. In fact, my phone is AMPS/TDMA/GSM (one of the few ever made) and I pay the same regardless of the network I use.

As the paper cited earlier in this argument noted, since the mobile customer pays all of the mobile charges here, the customer cares what the cost is. As a result, the actual average cost per minute of mobile service, counting subscription fees and all per call charges,is much lower in the US than it is in Europe, about 10 cents/min here vs about twice that in Europe.

There are two other reasons that the US went with mobile customer pays. One is that US phone users expect local calls to be free or close to it. In many areas of the country, even if a number is in the same area code, you dial 1+area code+number if it's a six cent toll call, just so you shouldn't make a toll call by mistake. We've had a bunch of attempts at caller-pays, all of which vanished without a trace as the people who thought that they were so important that their friends and business contacts would pay extra to call them turned out to be mistaken.

The last is that the US phone system uses a fixed ten-digit numbering scheme with a three digit area code and seven digit number, and that's not going to change. (Before someone asks why we don't use variable length numbers like in Europe, we designed our long distance switching system first, in the late 1940s when there were probably more phones in North America than in the rest of the world combined. It made our mechanical and relay switches much more flexible. The real question is why when AT&T offered the fixed-length scheme to European PTTs, they didn't take it, and they are now crawling toward fixed length numbers 40 years later.) If we were doing caller-pays, we'd have had to allocate new area codes for mobile numbers in each area of the US and Canada, and there weren't enough unused area codes to do that.

A positive result of the combined numbering is that the US mobile and landline networks are much more integrated than the European ones are. We can port phone numbers not just from one mobile carrier to another, but from mobile to landline and back, with landline also including VoIP. If I decide that I like my mobile and I want to dump my landline, I can port my landline number so that callers don't even know that I've switched and I don't have to give out a new number. Is that ever going to happen in Europe? Unlikely.

R's, John

The majority of US plans have so many inclusive minutes this is unlikely, certainly for me it would be almost unheard of..!

Ivor

On Cingular you have rollover, so you end up accumulating tons of minutes. On Sprint, they bump you up to the next tier of minutes, and don't gouge you. Verizon still gouges you, but again, it's just a matter of fitting your plan to your needs.

The reason for CDMA is that it doesn't drop calls as readily, due to the elastic capacity, and that you can cover a given area with less cell towers. The whole world is moving to CDMA technology, even the GSM countries, so don't use the word "historical"!

Good point. The whole world is moving to CDMA, too bad it couldn't be the same standard!

Another reason I like the US system.

I seem to be in a huge minority here in the UK though.

Ivor

indeed, 35p/min. My Orange phone doesn't differentiate as its an "any network" tariff (though I probably would get more inclusive minutes if it wasn't).

Phil

The question of "consumers pay more for phone calls" is not answered by quoting the cheapest special deal available. It requires looking at the plans that people actually use, and taking into account all calls including those from landlines and those from outside the country, and blending in all those charges.

So they can make unlimited free calls to mobiles and landlines?

miguel

If it's a "Your Plan" tariff you get 50% extra minutes for Orange to Orange or to landlines if you opt not to have inclusive cross-net.

Ivor

We're talking about the real price, counting inbound as well as outbound calls and line rental. Looking at the price difference for me to call a Finnish landline and a Finnish mobile, it looks like callers are charged about 15 cpm for calls to mobiles.

Whoopee. I pay $30/mo for a bundle of 3750 minutes. That's 0.8 cpm if I used them all.

Landline phones all have a monthly fee, but the local calls are free. People talk for hours.

See what I mean?

R's, John

Not necessarily. In Finland one can get calls at 6.9 cents a minute and

As I said it is 6.9 cents a minute to any phone. Ah I see, yuo assume the friends have land lines. Here people do not in general have land lines anymore. Why would they have them?

Osmo

Ivor Jones wrote: The reasons

That assumes that land lines are the norm and being mobile is special. Maybe that is and will remain the case with RPP. In Finland mobile calls are the norm. One typically pays the same regardless of the type of the phone the receiver has.

There are some problems here regarding the pricing in Finland. Land line to mobile calls have been very costly. A four minule mobile-landline call could be 28 cents when reversed was 1,13 euros. But why would you use the landline and not your mobile anyway? This has been partially fixed so that one can choose the operator used to carry the call (with a prefix or deal) so that now one can get it at about half the above. Another problem is so called corporate numbers. These are cheap when called from a land line (about the cost of a local call) but about 30 cents a minute when called from a mobile regardless of your operator. The phone companies advertise these numbers as cheap to callers so the companies and government agencies using them do not necessarily even know the high price the mobile callers pay to call them. (The companies do not get any of the money. It is divided by the operators). Lately the high prices have become better known and this could lead to lowered prices as it is bad publicity for the companies using them.

Osmo