My question is prompted by post 18 in this thread and I didn’t want to hijack that thread.
I’ve heard similar comments and have to ask, what is so great about cell phones outside the US? I’ve done some reading but haven’t really seen anything that makes that make sense. The only thing I can think is that they have options that US cell phones don’t. But at least to me, that doesn’t make them wildly better since all I care about is making calls on one. Is there something I’m missing here?
The cell service here sucks. Calls are aprox. $1.20/min and the phone I have (admittedly not top of the line–like you, I just need it to make calls) is not as good as the crappy one I had in the states.
Potential differences vs. the UK… here:
-they’re massively popular; everybody has one (or more than one!)
-text messaging is HUGE - something like 4 billion (4 million million) messages per month are sent
-nobody pays for incoming calls
-the majority of mobile phones in use are probably less than two years old, with many people changing their handset every year.
In the US, one’s choice of handset is generally limited to the ones offered by a specific carrier, and a handset obtained through one carrier cannot be easily transferred to another. In many other countries, one shops for their service and handset separately.
I have heard that cellphone service in the US is very poor, especially in terms of the logistics of actually making a call. Crackly sound, that sort of thing. I’ve also heard that in the UK, it’s very complicated even to get a cellphone (or “mobile” as they’re called there, I believe), as a lot of paperwork is involved, or so says a Thai colleague of my wife’s who has been sent to Leeds for graduate school.
Here in Thailand, the service is excellent and efficient. Quite cheap, too. Everyone has them and uses them. (They’re called “mobile phones” or “mobiles” here, after the British fashion.) We just had some visitors from the US, and they were impressed with the mobile-phone use. When I lived in the US, cellphones were still non-existent, so I don’t have personal experience with them there, but I was surprised to hear how poor the service is there.
In fact, mobile-phone use here is quite a problem in that people are very rude about using them. There’s really no sense of etiquette or consideration for others around you; people will not uncommonly scream into them at a moment’s notice regardless of where they are, including movie theaters; they just forget their surroundings. I’m not convinced mobiles are that good an invention for this reason alone.
Yes, this is very true for Thailand. And the competiton for service is cutthroat, which keeps prices low.
It’s not quite that huge - “billion” means a thousand million, 10[sup]9[/sup], rather than 10[sup]12[/sup], which it hasn’t meant since about 1970. Otherwise, 4 billion messages per month would amount to something like 100,000 messages for every person in the country.
Well, wandering into a shop and buying one works for me. Either a specialist 'phone shop or, indeed, at a large supermarket. Perhaps that is just a case of West Yorkshire being a little world all to itself. 
(Joking). I’ve only used pre-pay 'phones , though, so I suppose it’s possible it gets trickier with a monthly contract 'phone.
I will pose a partial reason why this may be although it is only part of the story. The U.S. established land line service early one and built a national standard of service that was quite good throughout the 20th century. There were some legal concerns along the way but the whole country was blanketed by an interconnected telephone network that was reliable and understandable to users. The breakup of Ma Bell into competing companies was a boon to long-distance subscribers in general.
Other countries did not have such a stable telephone infrastructure to compete with already. This applies to the third-world countries but in some of Europe as well. Areas that can just grab already invented technologies and run with them have an advantage in these types of scenarios. Erecting cell phone towers is much easier than the old way of wiring every building and finding places to route the master cables. That is what happened. Countries with poor existing service just scrapped a lot of what was existing and moved straight to the newest mobile phone standards rather cheaply and seemlessly.
In the U.S., we had (and still have to some degree), almost every type of telephone service ever offered here still in place. The mobile phone companies themselves branched off into different standards to complicate matters more. If we could just “start over” like some other places did in effect, we could have cutting edge cell phone service too but the legacy, logistical, and business hurdles won’t all that.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. The U.S. operates on 110v household electricity because we adopted before it was found out that other standards like 240v they use in Europe might be better in some ways. Countries like Korea are developing kick-ass internet access because they started late and the technology available then was better that what many other countries had to start with.
If you get a pre-pay one, there’s no paperwork at all. It’s if you want a contract that they’ll do a credit check - and particularly if you’ve not been a British resident, this will get convoluted.
I’ve never owned or signed up for one outside Australia, and never set foot in the US, so my knowledge is limited, but anecdotally is as follows:
Even back in '99 I could travel to industrialised Asian countries, and simply make a call - at most I might have to let my telco know I was travelling a day or two in advance. In a poorer country like Vietnam, I’d need a local SIM, but the handset was still good. I’ve been told it would be good in Europe, but in the US it would be a doorstop.
In India, they’re everywhere - everyone and their maid has at least one cellphone. Seriously.
Phones are not linked to plans here, and it’s not uncommon for people to change their handset every other year. You can get a cellphone for as little as $50, and call costs are probabkly the lowest in the world.
On my post-paid plan, a call to another cellphone costs 50 paise, or a little over 1 cent, a minute while calls to landlines cost 2 cents a minute. Text messages, or SMS’s, cost me 2 cents to send. Pre-paid plans tend to be more expensive, at around 3 cents a minute for outgoing calls.
Incoming calls and messages are free across the board.
Competition for new subscribers is fierce, and I’ve read reports ranging from 2 million to 5 million new mobile (GSM + CDMA) subscribers a month! We get pretty basic service though - CDMA provides decent transfer speeds, but GSM is stuck with GPRS/EDGE. There is talk of rolling out 3G services soon, but so far all we’ve seen is talk.
This must be what she did, gone the contract route. She said it was very complicated.
In Dubai, cellphones are probably more common than landlines. There is currently only one active service provider, although a second one should be starting services any time now. Both are government controlled though, so no one really expects call costs to come down much.
Service is pretty good, and the new provider will be rolling out with 3G. Incoming calls and messages are free. Costs are higher than in India, at around 10 cents a minute.
In China, everyone has one.
My friend had an awesome phone that he was given free just because he’s such a high user of the service.
Again, land lines are hard to set up and very expensive; this is what drives the high cell usage in China. I prefer the U.S.'s system actually.
Maybe it’s just a California thing but every one I know owns a cell phone from my parents who are pushing 70 to my 12 year old nephew. Texting is very popular. I probably only send/receive 30 texts on a busy month but I know many people who are in the several hundreds a month. You can walk into a store here and be out with a working phone in twenty minutes.
If you get a GSM phone (Cingular/ATT or T-Mobile) you can use it anywhere. I have used my phone in Taiwan, China, Australia, New Zeland, France, Spain, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Holland and probably a few places I am forgetting. I just opened it up and it worked the same as if I was in my living room.
I don’t think that I know anyone with a phone that is less than a couple years old.
I think that I’ve addressed every point made so far except for paying for incomming calls and texts. I didn’t read the other thread but what is the difference on average for the price per minute of cell time. If it’s much less in the U.S. then it’s worth it to pay for incomming calls.
To that point, I have Cingular and so do the people that I call the most. My calls are free when talking to another Cingular customer no matter who makes the call. I pay like $30 a month for cell service and call and text all that I want, which admittedly is less than the average person.
So why would I be happier with my service in Europe?
I think this whole US cell phones are behind the times thing has gotten a little out of hand.
Everyone in the U.S. that I know has a cell phone. Many younger people don’t bother with a land phone. I’m not sure what the average age of hardware is, but I’d say it’s pretty up to date. When I lived in Europe, the reason texting was so popular is because calls were so expensive. I think my rate was 60 euro cents a minute. (granted, prepaid) Even if you split that between the two parties, that is still about 40 American cents each. So, even split, I get about 2.5 hours of talk time in Europe for the same price a month that I get virtually unlimited use here. Despite paying for incoming calls, I bet US consumers pay less than UK consumers.
Hardly ever. And as for U.S. visitors being impressed upon seeing cell phone ubiquity in Thailand, I would guess they aren’t impressed because Thais use cells more than Americans but because they mistakenly believed most Thais wouldn’t be able to afford something like that.
It is true that US phones are often married to a carrier, but the savvy can unlock the phone or just buy an unlocked one on eBay to begin with, and sell the free one that comes with the plan on same.
I have no idea how accurate it is/was but at least a few years ago conventional wisdom here was that network coverage in the US was unimpressive. It was said that due to competing standards and large sparsely populated areas there was a real possibility that a particular phone couldn’t connect to a network even in inhabited areas.
After living in Korea for the past decade, I find cellphone service a bit frustrating here in the US. No reception underground, not a lot of options for payment plans, payment for incoming calls, limited choice of phones… Actually, I personally like the fact that I can buy a “minimal” phone here - in Korea it’s almost impossible to get a cellphone without a camera and a TV and an MP3 player and God knows what else built in. But in terms of cell phone savvy I feel that the US is a bit behind Korea (although I’m not sure how it would be in terms of cost).
If by prepaid you mean pay-as-you-go, it’s hardly meaningful to compare that to a contract rate. PAYG is always more expensive. For $60 you can get a 900-minute plan i.e. one that includes 900 minutes per month to any UK landline or mobile.