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Originally Posted by DRNewcomb
I'm not sure I said CSP (Cellular Subscriber Pays) is "better", just different. I think that most Americans would reject the idea of making the people who call them pay 15c-30c per minute as people in other countries do. The falicy is that incoming calls are "free". They aren't free at all. You just shift the cost to someone else, and when that someone is your wife or kids calling from home, it can get pretty spendy.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by DRNewcomb
I'm not sure I said CSP (Cellular Subscriber Pays) is "better", just different. I think that most Americans would reject the idea of making the people who call them pay 15c-30c per minute as people in other countries do.
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OK, so one could say in brief:
the Americans say "We pay for being accesible on the phone outdoors";
the Europeans say "We pay in order to be able to reach other people when they are outdoors".
But what is the
real reason of that difference??? One might say that's because Europe is more "socialist" or "leftist" than the USA (the Europeans don't want to pay for themselves :P ). I think it's not about getting used to CSP - since Russia has reached, as Asick said, almost 125 million mobile users and moves to CPP anyway...
:unsure:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by DRNewcomb
The falicy is that incoming calls are "free". They aren't free at all. You just shift the cost to someone else, and when that someone is your wife or kids calling from home, it can get pretty spendy.
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Who says that calling is free at all
? But you can say the same about landline calls - somebody must pay - the difference is that those calls are cheaper...
And your argument about "family calls" can be easily extended to any "closed" group of people with the common budget for phone calls like a company or public institution. In such a case your real objective is just to minimize the overall cost, and not to avoid paying for incoming calls, so I agree with you. But what about people who receive many calls initiated from outside the "closed" group?
And one more remark about "who pays for what", more precisely about my CPP case
. I and my wife have mobile phones but we have also a landline at home and the most important reason for having it that we don't want people who call us from landlines to pay high fixed-to-mobile costs. But the cost of the landline monthly fee is so high (no included minutes, all non-800 calls are paid) that we could pay 50-70% less if we replaced it with an appriopriate mobile plan (i.e. with discount to landlines). In fact, we can say that incoming calls to our _landline_ are not free because we pay an equivalent of about $11 a month for "nothing" i.e. for keeping the line "alive". If we replaced it with a mobile plan with good landline rates, for the same money we could have up to 100 minutes of landline outgoing calls, and, of course, the opportunity of receiving calls without any extra charge as well. I dare to say that if all landlines in Poland were closed, and the current mobile tariffs remained unchanged, then global payments for the same amount of voice calls would significantly decrease