After United Mobile

[adam917]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

My head is spinning from all this. I grant you I'm not a geek but interested in good value for my money. I never suspected that if I buy an international sim putting money up front and basically only use it to receive calls in those areas where they advertise it's free to receive I am violating any tariff or something like that. Is that what is being said here? Isn't this similar to a bait and switch plan when restrictions such as this are buried?

And it's almost something like I once read from an executive at one USA gsm carrier. He was asked how you could afford to give people unlimited use at whatever the rate was at that point. He said because the average person who uses unlimited never (or almost never) reaches the level he or she would if they used prepaid. It's far more profitable for them to give unlimited say for $80/month rather than 500 minutes @ 15¢/minute and that most people even with unlimited never gets to 500 minutes!

I bought a United Mobile card, put up 25€ or whatever up front...they have the €25, use it mostly to receive for free, they have €25 they wouldn't have if I haven't bought the card and also don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Chalk me up as one confused hombre.

You should remember that we in the US often get unlimited night-time (usually running from as early as 19:00 and ending the next morning, sometimes as late as 09:00) & weekend minutes to any domestic phone, and some people really take advantage of that. One person I know uses around 10'000 (yes, ten thousand) night/weekend minutes and maybe 200 daytime minutes every month. If they had to pay for each minute, the price per minute would work out to an extremely cheap eight tenths of one cent on our current plan, even less on months which more time were used. I don't know how tarriffs are in most other countries but I bet that even having unlimited incoming calls isn't as good in the end when you are used to using a mobile phone like you would a land-line. The average price per minute is probably much higher. We got rid of our landline due to the mobile rates being that good.