What? I pay the equivalent of 9 dollars for a plan with unlimited calls, unlimited text messages and 10GB a month of internet bandwidth. I live in Europe. Is it really that much more expensive in the US?
Wait, US is still RPP? I was talking about this at the weekend as one possible reason why mobile phones didn't take off in the US as fast as they did in Europe, but assumed that they'd now caught up precisely because the ridiculous RPP setup had been done away with. How on earth does anyone in the US manage to keep their phone bill down?
You actually TALK on the phone? I have one of the smallest voice plans AT&T offers that still has unlimited text and even that has way too many minutes. I think the only number I actually call is my parents' land line. Even my dentist's office texts appointment reminders instead of calling.
I'd think one of the biggest reasons for slow adoption is the same as our broadband adoption- It's hard for effectively 2 big companies to reliably provide service for 300 million people spread out over something like 8 million km^2 (for the lower 48 states) and have it still be affordable. For example a friend of mine still didn't have internet access at all in the 2010s because they would have had to pay to have special construction done near their house in addition to the high monthly bill.
If my girlfriend calls me and we talk for an hour, that "uses up" 60 minutes on each of our phone plans. We're both in the U.S. I'm on Verizon and she's on AT&T but the carriers don't matter, even if we were both on the same one.
Wow. I just learned that there are worse places in regards to telco rip offs then Germany. OK; I had expected that, but having both parties paying for the same phone call is some kind of twisted evil genius's plan - isn't it?
