Advice for calling US Mobile Phone?

And if you only count Christmas gifts, socks and aftershave are free.

It is not productive in a discussion of the overall cost paid for phones in a given system, to fixate on exceptional cases such as people who only receive and never place calls. If everyone were like that, there would be no phone calls. Someone has to place them, and that someone is paying far more than they need to, due to an anti-competetive system.

miguel

Maybe a UK person, can post what the total costs would be for a typical plan as outlined below, including the termination charges, as I did for the most expensive U.S. carrier:

Verizon Americas Choice UK Plan

The monthly plan is $40, and I added $20 for the cost to the calling party to/from an out-of-network mobile phone, at $0.10 per minute, since we are trying to find the total cost.

I tried doing this for a UK plan, and came up with £105.00, using the OFCOM termination fee limit, but I'm sure that this is too high.

The most common is 19:00 to 08:00

An example of "weekends" is from Friday at 19:00 to Monday at 08:00

That's about what the studies showed as well, about 2x the cost in Europe per call. CPP termination fees really drives up the price.

It'll depend so much on what plan the incoming caller uses. Also it is possible to be a "phone tart" and get a very cheap contract and phone, by switching contracts every year. The networks are so desperate to sign people up that they offer retailers big bonuses for every new customer, which some retailers use to offer cashback to the customer.

I'll have a go using Orange ED50 plus 1899, the best value indirect access telco. I need to guess the average call length, say 5 minutes (so 100 mins is 20 calls). Also off-peak is different between weekdays and weekends - so I will assume half and half.

-- Andy

It costs me typically £13 a month including line rental.

Typically 600 minutes of calls mobile-mobile would cost around £50 in the UK.

Cross network mobile-mobile calls are just as expensive as landline-mobile calls here.

Yeah right. That would have meant they'd be paying about £60-70 a month for their phone usage, rather than about £15. Great idea.

They know where the problem was. His wife's friend has now put her landline back in, and they are a bit wiser about calling mobiles.

-- Andy

Here 600 minutes from a landline costs 18 euros + 12 cents/call.

The calls from landlines to mobiles are expensive here also. If one views a five minute call then the charge _per minute_ is

Mobile->anything ca. 7-9 Land->Mobile ca. 17-29 Local call: ca. 3-4 LD: ca. 5-9

The longer the call the greater the difference between local and mobile calls is. However, as most people use mobiles anyway that's not an issue.

Well the problem was with his wife, not with her friend. She should have used her mobile. Ditching the landlibe avoids such problems.

Osmo

That's their problem..!

Ivor

That is terrible. The 19:00 to 08:00 is offered by Fido, a GSM service provider in Canada.

With nights do you mean something like after 5 pm or after 9 pm. That makes a huge difference. I never call someone after 9 pm unless that was agreed beforehand. Weekends have never had cheaper prices here. As I understand those pricings are result of mobile use still being mainly a business use.

Sure they decided around 1990 that mobiles are the place where growth is. They did not expect people to close landlines. In fact they predicted a few hundred thousand mobile users by 2000. They got over three million.

I hope you are not implying that Finland has been some developing country when it comes to landlines. Nothing could be further from the truth. The first telephone exchange in Helsinki opened in 1882 (the first in the U.S. and the world opened in 1878). Unlike most of Europe telephone was here mainly a private venture and not state operation so it spread relatively rapidly. The above dates should be viewed in the perspective that in the standard of living Finland was about 50 years behind the U.S. By 1978 Finland was 8th on the word on phone density (41/100 people compared to 72/100 in the leading U.S.). The number of landlines peaked in 1997 at 2.85 million or 55.4 / 100 people. Since then it has dropped to about 2.5 million. The number of mobile connections was 4.7 million in 2003. That's about 90 / 100 people. note the above makes no difference between corporate and home phones. In 1994 94% of households had a mobile phone. Only 64% had landline.

Sources: Immonen: Sillat Sielujen ja Ihmismieleen (History of HPY/Elisa) Statistics Finland: Statistical yearbook of Finland 2003

Osmo

There are people who are too polite to hand up on a telemarketer so they buy what he sells just to get rid of him. Hanging up is a big no no to some people.

Osmo

If you have friends who go to bed early, there's an extra cost option that makes your free nights start at 1900. I haven't bothered since I don't use up my minutes as it is.

Of course the cost as something to do with the time people use to talk to phone but most people do not have any need to spend hours every day on a phone no matter how cheap it is. They have better things to do. The more people give up landlines the more they use mobile phones for just idle chatting and plans are developed for that.

When one talks about cost one should not focus only on those who talk much. If one here wants just to receive calls it costs nothing besides the actual phone.

Osmo

Actually it's 21:00-0:700.

Except the criteria you used are incredibly arbitrary, and even by any stretch of the imagination not realistic. Depending on the distribution of who calls whom, and how they pay for it, you'd get drastrically different results. Who knows what the average mobile usage (or calls to mobiles) is in either system. I admit that finding objective concrete data on mobile usage is really difficult. I've certainly tried, and I get very vague results. Given that you seem to know where it all is, I'd kind of hoped you might offer more links to real data other than a footnote in a document.

Not arbitrary at all. I wanted to show the difference in prices if calling patterns that are shaped by people avoiding making calls to mobiles are NOT factored in. What happens with caller pays, is that everyone tries to avoid calling mobile phones.

I did two comparisons.

I compared the 1000 minutes divided up as stated in the previous post, then I did peak-only, with 100 minutes mobile to off-network mobile, 100 minutes of termination charges from off-peak mobile to mobile, 100 minutes of mobile to landline, and 100 minutes of landline to mobile.

For 1000 minutes:

Verizon Wireless in the U.S. had an average price of $.06/minute T-mobile in the UK had an average price of $0.19/minute

For:

Verizon Wireless in the U.S. had an average price of $0.15/minute T-mobile in the UK had an average price of $0.19/minute

Where the termination charges really hurt UK users is in off-peak received calls, and off-peak calls made to off-network mobiles. For a U.S. user, all these calls would be free. Mobile phones are used extensively as a replacement for long distance service, since you can make calls of virtually any length, anywhere in the country, at no charge, nights and weekends.

Also, Verizin is the most expensive U.S. carrier. A similar plan on T-Mobile gives you 1000 peak minutes, but T-Mobile's coverage in the U.S. is not very good.

Unless it's to plan something for that same evening (like an early dinner) I think it's pretty rare that I make or receive a personal call before 9pm.

None of which is to say that it's rude or polite to call at any particular hour (except Saturday and Sunday mornings - I think there's something in the Bible about how rude that is) - it all depends on the people you talk to. The point is that it's not useful to assume that just because your own calling falls into a particular pattern, you can somehow apply that to the general public.

miguel

On some carriers this is an option, i.e. Sprint charges $5 per line for the better hours for N&W. Those of us that have earlier N&W as a result of having signed up before the carriers worsened N&W, cannot make many changes to our service without losing the earlier start time.

People can call my phones whenever they want. If I'm not here to answer it, then voicemail or an answering machine will do so. If I am here but don't want to answer it, I don't..! If I don't want to be disturbed by the ringing, I switch off the ringers in the phones..! Or in the case of my mobiles, switch them off all together..!

Easy really..!

Ivor