| Osmo R 2005-05-28, 8:45 pm |
| John R. Levine wrote:
>
> As the paper cited earlier in this argument noted, since the mobile
> customer pays all of the mobile charges here, the customer cares what
> the cost is. As a result, the actual average cost per minute of
> mobile service, counting subscription fees and all per call
> charges,is much lower in the US than it is in Europe, about 10
> cents/min here vs about twice that in Europe.
What? In Finland if you call 100 minutes you pay as low as 7,56 cents a
minute. With 1000 minutes it is as low as 3,58 cents a minute. That's to
land lines or to any mobiles and at any time. We typically do not have
cheaper calls on nights and weekends. Those are typical in countries
where mobiles are still associated into business use and in off hours
there is more free capacity. The network operators charge same
regardless of the time so if cheaper calls on evenings are provided it
is for the service operator to pay the difference and hope one gets it
back on the more expensive daytime calls.
So could you give what someone making 100 minutes of calls would pay in
the U.S.? More than 7,56 a month?
>
> There are two other reasons that the US went with mobile customer
> pays. One is that US phone users expect local calls to be free or
> close to it.
You mean free with no monthly fee? That's a good deal. In Finland we are
talking about 10 cents a call + 1 cent a minute. The monthly fee is
around 10 euros.
> In many areas of the country, even if a number is in the same area
> code, you dial 1+area code+number if it's a six cent toll call, just
> so you shouldn't make a toll call by mistake. We've had a bunch of
> attempts at caller-pays, all of which vanished without a trace as the
> people who thought that they were so important that their friends and
> business contacts would pay extra to call them turned out to be
> mistaken.
In general it is hard to mix the systems. One had to choose either one
for a country.
> A positive result of the combined numbering is that the US mobile and
> landline networks are much more integrated than the European ones
> are. We can port phone numbers not just from one mobile carrier to
> another, but from mobile to landline and back, with landline also
> including VoIP. If I decide that I like my mobile and I want to dump
> my landline, I can port my landline number so that callers don't even
> know that I've switched and I don't have to give out a new number.
> Is that ever going to happen in Europe? Unlikely.
In Finland one operator tried such a scheme but the land line operators
refused to give the numbers to the mobile operator as the law did not
force them to do so. Well it was not a true porting but one got two
numbers, the old land line and a mobile number. One could receive calls
through either (at predictable costs to the caller) but the receiver saw
only the mobile number. (so basically it was an call forward done by the
operator at no cost to you)
Also we used to have so called city phones with land line numbers. They
could only be used locally in the particular city. They have since been
discontinued. (At least in Helsinki). Those had a problem of very
expensive calls to mobile phones.
Osmo
|