OT - Cellphone billing

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 07:24:37AM +0300, William Muriithi wrote:
> I have for long noticed a billing difference between America system -
> USA and Canada (Not sure about the others as I haven't visited them)
> that is really different to that in Europe and Africa.  When A call B,
> in Americas, you charge A and B. In Africa and Netherlands, you only
> charge A unless B was roaming when he/she received a call.
> 
> Now, I am not whining and don't expect Americas to adopt other
> countries' systems, but what logic is used to explain the above?  Is
> there like a history about it, because that is all I can think of.
> Imagine someone sending you a letter and the post office decided to
> charge both the recipient and sender? I understand the issue with
> metric and English units, other quirks, but dude/dudets, this one
> don't make much sense, in my opinion.

In europe the caller pays for the call, so if you call a cell phone
(which generally have their own area codes so you can easily tell it is
a call phone) you know its going to cost a lot more than otherwise.  Of
course you also pay for all calls since there is no such thing as free
local calls.

In north america all phone numbers are considered equal, so if you call
a local number, it is free, and a further away number costs money to
call.  If the number happens to be a call phone then the owner of the
call phone is responsible for the cost of using that cell phone since
the caller has no way of knowing that they are calling a cell phone.

The european method of course has made it possible to have a cell phone
that really is only for emergencies these days for practically no money
since you can receive calls for free and only pay for the few outgoing
calls you make.  My parents picked one up last time they went to visit
family in denmark and for a pay as you go, the phone cost about $300 to
buy, and then the starter package from a phone company was $20 which
includes $10 worth of pay as you go, and sets up the voice mail, phone
number, includes the SIM card, etc.  Money paid lasts for 12 months, and
the minimum top up is $10, so essentially they can maintain a cell phone
in Denmark for $10 per year now.  Rather handy given they visit every 3
years or so, but pay phones have become extinct there so having a cell
phone is pretty much required.

Whats the cheapest you can get a pay as you go cell phone here, and can
you get free incoming calls (the answer is no as far as I can tell).

Competition is good, and europe sure has that now.  20 years ago they
had only government monopolies on phone service for the most part.
There certainly isn't any competition in the cell phone market in
canada anymore.  All we have are 3 giant old companies all happily
charging the same high rates for the same service and buying out anyone
that tries to start competing with them.  Setting up a cell phone
company is also very expensive here given the low population density
there just isn't a market for that many companies to build expensive
networks.

--
Len Sorensen
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