Advice for calling US Mobile Phone?

Sure, but in the same way you can set up your phones so you're oblivious to people calling, it's also not unusual for some people to have a cut-off time after which they won't call, or expect a call. I won't usually call anyone after 10pm unless it's arranged in advance, or they say 'call as late as you want.' I keep my various phones' ringers on all the time when I'm at home (I switch the phone off in many work and other situations)- not that I always answer the calls. I usually disable the text alert sounds though- as you can expect to get email at any time, and there have been a few times I've forgotten, and have been awoken at

It's entirely arbitrary to divide the distribution of minutes the way you did. Do you have evidence that people use their phones in the way you did your breakdown?

It would help if you knew a little about how the UK market actually works, instead of guessing. For example, most of my students are on deals where their inclusive minutes include mobiles and landlines- they probably call mobiles more than landlines. I have a different kind of plan, which suits my needs- i.e. I call landlines most of the time. The point is that there are a variety of plans available depending on what your callin pattern is. Most people are probably better off on a PAYG plan IMO. Recent statistics for the UK indicated that 75% of mobile phone 'accounts' were PAYG, but I suspect a lot of those accounts are dormant.

I'm aware of how you divided it up, and it's an entirely arbitrary comparison. You have no evidence that this is anything like a 'typical' (I note the word was thrown around quite liberally by yourself and andypandy) mobile phone usage in either market.

There are also cheap plans in the UK which have large numbers of offpeak minutes. And you can call landlines at any time of the day in the UK for an unlimited time for as low as a 3p connection charge. It's pointless making these kinds of comparisons unless you know how people use their phones. If you could point me to a website which actually breaks down such statistics, I'd love to see it. I'm mostly finding summarised market research, most of it with some kind of agenda.

Fair enough, but it's not as if Osmo's calling pattern is that unusual. There's a good reason that offpeak kicks in at 6, 7 or 9pm of whatever it is in someone's local market. Most people want or need to make calls in peak time- that's why it's more expensive to call then. The companies don't give their customers 'free' offpeak minutes because they like them.

So, for the sake of comparison assume that the 1,000 minutes is used up. And also assumed a usage during a specific time period, for example, from 07:00 to 20:00 everyday.

It's irrelevant how people use their phones, both calls to and from mobiles, from and to landlines, because how they use them is highly influenced by the way the tariffs are set up. Just in this thread, we've seen many posts about how people avoid calling mobiles from landlines whenever possible, due to the termination charges.

What you want to do is to look at several different calling patterns, and the relative costs of each. It's very hard to do, because the mobile companies do not make all their charges public, at least not on their web sites.

True- it's surely not irrelevant how people use their phones, because the issue at hand is how much people pay for their calls. So, if someone has a mobile with inclusive minutes to other mobiles, then the cost isn't the same factor.

You can usually figure out the costs of calls if you delve deep enough into the web sites, but of more interest to me would be how people use their phones. If someone has 1,000 minutes on a plan, but only averages using 500 of them, then it doesn't make sense to divide the plan's cost by a 1,000 to get the per minute cost.

It is in a way, because people will, consciously or unconsciously, tailor their phone usage to fit the tariff they're using. When I was on pay as you go, I made hardly any calls on it, using mainly the landline. Now I have a contract with hundreds of inclusive minutes, I make almost all my calls on the mobile. I use the normal landline hardly at all, but I use VoIP to call other people also on it, for free.

Ivor

I'd bother doing so if I thought that most mobile users were using their phone between 0700 and 2000 and using a 1,000 minutes a month.

Indeed, but it's still the case that that kind of consumer will be calling mobiles and not worrying about the cost as much as someone on, say, a PAYG plan calling cross network.

It's highly likely that if Orange dump the plan I'm currently on, I may very well just go on to PAYG. I'm considering it with my partner's account. The whole reason I got onto contract in the first place was because it offered lower roaming costs. Now, you have companies which offer far better deals (Riiing), or similar costs on PAYG (thinking Easymobile for example) and it seems less attractive.

I use about 100 peak minutes a month, so my 300 minutes per month plan is a bit wasteful, but it's the smallest plan I could get. It's around $32/month.

But where most people really rack up the minutes is nights and weekends, and on-network mobile-mobile. It would normally cost $0.06/minute to make a landline call from my house in Silicon Valley, to San Francisco, a mere 40 miles away. My wife's family all lives up there, and we were paying about $20 per month in "local long-distance." Similarly, calling anywhere in the U.S. will cost about $0.025/minute on the least expensive long distance calling card, and we probably use another couple of hundred minutes on the mobile phone, that would otherwise cost another $5. Since Verizon has a very high market share in my area (GSM coverage is very poor in my area), nearly every friend, relative, or colleague has Verizon service, and you can rack up another couple of hundred free peak minutes that way.

It doesn't really matter how you slice it, CPP always results in higher per-minute rates, the question is whether it's 1.3x, 1.5x, 2x, or 3x.

Because if the termination charges were not so high, they would not be intentionally avoiding making certain calls. I wanted people to look at the big picture, and not just look at how the wireless carriers have conditioned them to behave.

That is what the carriers want. They can successfully hide the true cost, when people think only about themselves.

It depends on the laws in each country, and if collusion is legal or not. In a free market, the total cost per call would fall dramatically with mobile party pays, because the cost becomes transparent (in the UK sense of the word!).

All studies on the issue of CPP/RPP/MPP show that the cost falls with MPP.

I struggle to use 120 minutes a month..!

Ivor

You're entirely correct. One of the main reasons I hang on to my contract is it's the only way of having Line 2. I need this as I don't want to give my main number to work.

Ivor

Probably none. Why do you insist things must be the same in other countries as in Finland? Give it a rest. The market is COMPLETELY different there than it is here in the US. That much is not going to change unless Finland suddenly acquires tons of land and grows to a population of 250 or 300 million people and suddenly ALSO acquires the political structure the telecomm industry has here.

In other words, find something else to whine about.

"chancellor of the duchy of besses o' th' barn and prestwich tesco" wrote in

Some GSM carriers in some areas of the U.S. are very capacity constrained, and try to encourage less peak use, and more off-peak use. The business customers that are paying for thousands of peak minutes per month, do not want dropped calls, or "system busy, please try later" messages.

I divided the 1000 minutes that way because it represents the non-business use of a typical user in the U.S.. There certainly are many, many business people that use 1000 peak minutes (salespeople, real estate agents, etc.) but they are not the majority.

It really doesn't matter how you slice it, or how many minutes you use in a scenario, as long as you make it a fair comparison by not claiming something like "well, I make only outgoing calls to landlines, and no one calls me due to the termination charges." The second scenario I did, showed a much smaller difference, when you look only at peak minutes, but this is not the typical use of a mobile phone.

They do not. I surely do not.

Osmo

Itr sure is not irrelevant. The price comparisons should of course be based on the real use of phones, not some imaginary use. If people seldom do call mobiles from landlines then I do not see how that should be included in the comparison.

I acknowledge that there is a problem in that pricing affects behavior (and behavior affects pricing) but that's just something one cannot avoid. For that reason it is very hard to compare fixed prices and per minute/per call prices as the behavior in different in those.

The problem with this is that by choosing the pattern one can choose the result. The idea of taking costs to all parties into question is just meaningless. I do not care what it costs to other parties (within reasonable limits). I optimize my behavior, let the callers do that for themselves.