Advice for calling US Mobile Phone?

Here the government made a clear decision that ADSL and GSM should be open to competition and separate from the old monopolies. So one can choose the ADSL operator. The local company then gets a rent for the line from the ADSL provider. As for cable I think you need to be hooked to the cable TV which means that you get all your TV from it. It costs nothing extra to the individual apartment owner (though one of course pays it as part of the monthly payment of pays that covers all the general expenses). One does not have to have pay-TV to get cable modem. As I have understood in the U.S. it is for the individual residents to decide to join or not join the cable. Here it is done at building basis. Individual residents can then choose whether to get pay-TV as extra.

Osmo

Further down is:

Table 4 - International Direct Dialled (IDD) PPM Prices to Mobile Telephones Operative Date:01.08.2000

IDD calls to some mobile telephones will be charged at 21.27 pence (ex VAT)/25 pence (inc VAT) per minute more than the equivalent IDD calls to fixed telephones. Full details of the destinations and number ranges to which this applies are shown in Section 2 Part 16

which points at:

I guess if the number of your SIM doesn't start as above, then you'll pay the landline rate, although this would seem odd, I thought the numbers in that list included all mobiles (except for countries like US and Canada where the receiver pays).

-- Andy

So you could end up babbling nonsense at the expense of the receiver. He might be too polite to remind you of it. I think it is better that the one who makes the call pays. Here one always knows if a number is mobile or not. Such a system may suit better the U.S. and Canada with its numerous local companies. In Europe the CPP is IMO better though there are problems with international calls. It may not be easy to tell from a foreign number if it is mobile or not.

Osmo

The number is 423 66 etc.- so that might explain it.

Depends when. A lot of US plans now offer either unlimited night and weekend minutes or a large enough number that it might as well be unlimited, e.g., I get 3500/mo. This works fine for me, since during the day I tend to be in the office with my landline at hand, and nights and weekends I'm more likely to be out.

Finland seems to be kind of a special case, just about the only place I know where there are more mobiles than landlines. It sounds like the landline service wasn't so grat, and the telco decided (not altogether unreasonably) to make mobiles irresistable rather than investing in landlines.

In the US, pretty much everyone had a phone by 1960. Other countries took a lot longer to catch up, and if they waited long enough, mobiles could be a good alternative. I gather that everyone in Hungary has a mobile, too, because it was faster to build a new mobile network after the communists left than to fix the decrepit fixed network.

R's, John

Not really. Usually about 600 mins a month.

The other point, here in the UK, is that if you don't have a landline then you are forcing most of your callers to pay much much more to call you, typically 10 times the cost. You may have reasonable mobile termination rates in Finland, we don't here. As I wrote earlier, a friend of mine saw his bill sky rocket when his wife's best friend decided to ditch her landline - their monthly bill which was usually a few pounds went up to over £50.

-- Andy

And of course GSM _is_ TDMA. The only reason that CDMA took hold in the U.S. is a) because CDMA is much more spectrally efficient, (U.S. has less spectrum available for mobile voice and data), and b) you can cover an equivalent area with far less cells, which is important in less densely populated areas.

Interesting. You could try the telediscount number for Liechenstein landlands, this would be 5ppm. Or the mobile one is 10ppm.

-- Andy

If something was costing me money and I didn't want to pay it, politeness wouldn't enter into it..!!

Ivor

Yet you continue to make arguments based on the reasoning that people in Finland don't talk on the phone very much, as if there's any reason for this other than the fact that phone calls there are so expensive.

miguel

Normally they have both, and everyone knows which is which. However, even if they only have a mobile, the costs to use it are far lower than in Europe (due to the called-party-pays system) so they feel freer to talk longer.

Unlimited local service is a very recent phenomenon in the few places in Europe where it exists, so there hasn't really been an alternative. Just bad vs worse.

I don't see how a bad landline system is justification for a bad mobile system, which seems to be your fundamental argument. Sure, that particular bad mobile system may have some advantages over that bad landline system but that doesn't mean it's better than a good mobile system.

miguel

This is the case in any number of underdeveloped nations. Mobile systems, as compared to landline systems, are cheap in terms of capital and expensive in terms of ongoing costs. So where there is not much money for long-term investment, or faith in long-term stability, it is more likely that investors will primarily fund development of mobile systems in order to realize short-term profits even though the overall costs to the country are greater.

miguel

Completely different rules apply in international calls. Basically one needs to pay the down link in full and more.

The operators provide calls to other networks at prices well below cost hoping to make it up in intra-network calls, calls to landlines and received calls. The reason is that the demand for same price on all destinations is very high because of number portability. (There is a toll free number to check the operator but it still is a hassle.) Another way to make money for them is also so called corporate numbers. Calling them with a mobile costs about 30 cents a minute this is divided between the mobile operator and the corporate number operator. In last Summer I had problems with my cable modem and TV-reception. I had to make several calls to the cable operator (which for some reason had chosen a national corporate number). The total bill for the calls was 15 euros. I asked them why they had such number and incorrect information on the costs in their web-page. The manager responding did not even know the price and it was found out that even the telephone operator keeping the number had incorrect information. I advised them to use a normal number instead and six months later they switched to one. Had it been normal number back then I would have paid less than half of it and even that would have been covered by free airtime I had left.

The termination fees currently vary between 6.8 and 10 cents a minute. They are considered generally way too high when same operators sell intra-network calls as low as 2-4 cents a minute and calls to any operator at 6.9-8.9 cents a minute. (Note the latter include 22 % VAT while the termination fees do not.). And of course it is the one that sells the intra-network calls at 2 cents that requests 10 cents from calls coming from other networks.

Osmo

Fortunately it is not so here.

You then make plenty of calls. Basically one needs to make many long calls for landline to be cheaper here. That 6.9 was just an example. There are other cheap deals. Especially the package deals are cheap compared to landlines. 500 minutes at 17.80 on mobile compared to 12.45 euros a month base fee on a landline.

Osmo

Well one can hope the other party does not have a mobile.

I doubt that. If they wanted to stay much longer on phone they'd get land lines.

Yes, that's an example of what lack of competition causes. Probably they want to keep on with the existing customers by giving a message that there is no return.

In most cases landline just just a hassle. There is additional phone number. One needs to have an answering machine or service for it, the phones have poor phone directories etc. It is much simpler just to have one phone even though it might in some cases cost more.

Well in some sense it is true. If all your friends get mobile phones you need to get one too. This has in some cases been reduced very lately when the calls to mobile phones were opened to competition. A ten minute call from land line to mobile on day time used to cost up to about 2,80. Now one can get it at 1,58. Still when one can get it at 69 cents from a mobile it is cheaper. (A 10 minute local call is around 20 cents) The worst, however, is pay phone to mobile. That can cost about 85 cents a minute or about 60 cent a minute premium over a local call. It is more than what phone booth to landline and landline to mobile cost added together. IMO when direct call costs more than indirect then there is a ripoff. Well the same run mobile phones and the phone booths.

Osmo

The other party might be too polite to interrupt you.

Osmo

It is when one considers the etiquette. In general it is the caller who has something to say and it is polite to listen what he has to say. Of course there is no law that says one cannot just hang up and in some cases one actually might have better things to do.

Osmo

With 300 minutes a month it is better get here a plan that gives 500 minutes at 17.80 a month. Also do no forget received calls. 10 minutes a day is pretty much. Average use here has been about 150 minutes a month though it has been increasing somewhat recently as prices dropped.

Osmo

In the UK the distinction between local and national has virtually disappeared, you pay the same to call the other end of the country as next door.

Also prices have plummetted, I pay nothing for off peak landline calls to anywhere in the UK, and peak rate there are indirect access services which charge a flat fee (2-3p) to call any UK landline for as long as you like.

So I don't think there's any danger of us going down the Finnish route...yet.

-- Andy