Quote:
Originally Posted by andy
Is it so much more expensive here?
We don't pay for incoming calls
... unless roaming in another country. If we are roaming, we have cheaper rates in Europe than most Americans get.
I could have bought 800 minutes and 1600 texts and free internet for £11.67 a month, if not bothering with a new phone. I didn't, as I was offered something cheaper for a year. Do you use much more than that for your $70 to $100? If so, double those minutes and texts for another £10 a month. Data is included free on most SIM-only contracts from about £20 a month
Or on prepaid, from 8p a minute for mobile to mobile. Is that 5 to 10 times a typical prepaid rate on US SIMs, especially when you count both ends paying?
The cheapest mobile broadband deal I can see in the UK at the moment would cost a VAT-registered business £1 a month. Ok, it's not unlimited, but 500 MB a month.
By all means slag off the costs of mobile use here, but at least rely on facts
Someone can get a free SIM card with £5 included credit, and use it for incoming calls forever, for no cost whatsoever.
The bill for outgoing calls from my landline for the past 3 months is under £2. I can leave a mobile at home which calls mine free, and other mobile networks at 8p/min; zero credit used in 2 months
One mobile network offers a landline number option on business mobile contracts. Using call forwarding to well-chosen other SIM cards, and certain callback providers, it would be possible to use this to make free calls from about 120 countries. Ok, that combined possibility is rare if not unique at the moment. But for anyone, roaming SIMs based on territories not far from here, for which you've been forecasting imminent closure for ages, can offer people roaming calls from about 20 pence a minute.
Perhaps it's time for you to stop going on about how backward telecoms are in the rest of the world, please. I don't see any need for you to use an AT&T $65 a month roaming data package here.
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Right on the money. The sucky thing here is most users are forced to get a package for messaging if they want to use it at all because you pay for incoming messages. For this reason, some very light or high ratio incoming : outgoing SMS, users may be better off here with a roaming SIM as those almost never charge for incoming SMS.
I think in the US what's going to happen is eventually the operators are going to get everyone on the unlimited bandwagon for all services (voice, messaging, & data), then up prices once again so they are eventually getting more money from each person (higher ARPU). Though given what Verizon is talking about what with metered billing for LTE data, perhaps that may not be the case. If users are going to eventually just have a data bill that covers all types of use but isn't itself unlimited or having a very high cap like above 100 GB, then they may pay widely varying rates if they use more MB/GB/TB per month than other months. Most Internet users don't have a concept of how much bandwidth they use every day/week/month and even if they did, it likely varies over time.