I was the other way around. Growing up the only time a billion ever came up was reading Isaac Asimov-type pop science books, and of course they all used the US billion. I didn’t hear of the British version until much later. Reading my admittedly rubbish link above, I realise that I’ve never even heard the term milliard. Was that in use in your recollection?
I’ve heard of milliard, but never come across it in the wild.
Two things spring to my mind here.
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$60 a month equates I think, to about £30 a month in the UK. That seems phenomenally expensive to me. I’m on PAYG which is more expensive and I’ll top up £20 or so every few months.
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Are you saying that you pay $60 a month for minutes but you don’t use them fully because of the free evening/weekend calls? If so then why not reduce your charges and minutes?
I wonder how much this might be to do with the plethora of complaints from Americans that their mobile phone coverage is poor and expensive. The USA does have something of a reputation for poor mobile phone service so perhaps your friend’s reaction is understandable. If I visited someone in another country where I believed a service to be expensive to my host I’d also be reticent in using it.
Here’s a list of T-mobile’s plans. $60 gets me 1500 minutes a month during the day, which is about 75 minutes per non-weekend day. I could probably get by with the $50 or $40 plan, but I think it does get a little pricey when you go over. It’s worth it to me to pay a little extra and not worry about it. I know I would have spent a fortune in France on PAYG if I talked as much as I do in the states, but I probably wasn’t tuned into the good deals, as it were, not being a Fracophone. I don’t have a home phone, so that cuts down on the expense.
According to this PAYG taffif guide for Virgin Mobile in the UK, 20 pounds a month will only have you talking about 5 minutes a day. Is Virgin a ripoff, am I misreading the prices, or do you just not use your phone all that much?
PAYG is an expensive way to use a mobile here, and the Virgin tarriffs seem about the norm. Most PAYG folks are kids or people who don’t use the phone much. You can get PAYG topup deals which offer hundreds of text messages for a fiver a month, and I think thats what a lot of teens use.
People keep saying “texts=teens”, and while it may be true, it’s not exclusively so. I use PAYG, because for £10/month, I get several hundred free texts, which I easily use up, many of them work-related. I don’t make many outgoing calls, but take a large number of incoming ones, so £10 normally suffices.
This country would grind to a halt without cell phones. Road networks are unreliable in the rainy season, mail often doesn’t get throguh, Internet is rare and slow and the landline network is nonexistant. For millions of Cameroonians, cell phones are the only reliable way to communicated between cities. The cell phone companies are one of only a few industries here and their presence is huge.
Cellphones here arn’t the best and most people cannot afford voice calls so they rely on texts. But what they’ve done for business, families, health and just about every aspect of life has been amazing.
I have had my cell phone based in another city for four years. I have never had roaming set up, and I am not charged for long distance calls within the USA. We do not pay for calls between us and other persons with the same cell service.
We pay ~$70/month for three cell phone lines (myself, husband, son) with all of our unused minutes rolled into the next month. The phone I just bought (Motorola Razr V3) cost only $29.99. I love my cell provider, and there are three local stores owned by a family who provide excellent service.
Used a lot in Central European languages.
You are obviously not married to a Czech.
I cannot stand the following sentence: “Call me back on the landline.” Because the office phone is paid for. We end up having to phone calls for every conversation. I have had a huge public fight over using my mobile phone instead of a phone-card pay-phone…I was expected to not use my mobile because the rates were cheaper on the smart-card pay-phones in the metro.
Just my wife? Oh no. Rich, BMW-driving PR firm and lawyer couple have these arguments too.
The IT side of the argument used to be in favour of everyone outside of USA. But I am noticing a difference now. I really want a Blackberry Pearl. Can I? Nope. We’re still stuck with those ugly blue and bulky Blackberry’s. I don’t even know if I can buy an unblocked one on eBay and have it shipped…there are some carrier-level blocks going on.
So, the USA was behind for a while, but I think it has caught up and in the next year or two will be ahead.
-Tcat
FWIW: I have a Nokia GSM phone I bought here in Bulgaria. When I first bought it, I bought a SIM card from one of the big companies here (M-Tel). I don’t have a plan, I buy vouchers when I run out of minutes. I definitely text more than I call, because it’s cheaper. Sound quality is good, but not any better than I got with Verizon back in Chicago (I never had any problems with that, but I knew people who couldn’t make calls in one room of their house, stuff like that). I know some people have plans, but it’s common just to use vouchers like I do.
Works for soda and candy dispensers at least pretty much all over Helsinki. My little brother got into quite a bit of trouble with my parents for using up his monthly credit buying Coke during recess every day at school. (He has a plan in my parents’ name that allows him to use 20€/month in messages and calls. He kept using it up in about three days.)
Also, you can order quite a lot of things via text message, like free samples of newspapers and magazines, people’s phone numbers or addresses if they’re listed, …just stuff, generally. It’s been said that Finns would gladly order dog shit onto the bottom of their shoes if they could do it by text message.
Cellphones (mobile phones) here in Australia are ludicrously cheap and plentiful. You can, for example, buy a brand new Nokia 1600 phone for AUD$69. Admittedly, the Nokia 1600 is about as no-frills as it’s possible to get without using two cans joined by a very long piece of string, but the fact is that one can purchase a brand new cellphone for under AUD$70.
Everyone has them, except for people in super-remote areas, and many of the farmers I know have one anyway for when they go into town.
The Telstra Empire have just launched their Next Generation network called “Next G”, which is a technological marvel of the modern age, but sales-wises it’s been a disaster of epic proportions.
The thing is, in Australia, many- if not most- people are on a “Cap” plan, where you pay X amount of dollars (usually around $50-$80) and receive an amount of call credits far in excess of that (typically $250-$550) worth, that can be used for whatever you like- calls, text messages, picture messages, video calls, Mobile Internet (but not downloads), and so on. Text Messages are generally 25c ea, picture messages 75c ea, calls around $1/min, and Video calls around $1.50/min.
There are four main networks here: Telstra, Vodafone, Optus, and 3. Telstra has the “Mum & Dad” crowd, Vodafone tends to have the “Yuppie” crowd, Optus is aimed at teenagers, and 3 are struggling a bit now everyone is offering 3G Videophones, so they’re going for thee “Mobile TV and Internet” thing.
Anyway, Telstra Next G doesn’t offer any included calls for the $40+ a month you have to pay. Basically, you get to pay Telstra $40 a month for the privilege of charging you more money to make calls, send TXT/PXT, watch mobile TV, and so on. As a result, most people fall about laughing when the Telstra sales people try and persuade them to sign up- even with a “free phone” (two year contract included, of course!), everyone simply says “Yes, but Vodafone/Optus/3 will give us a truckload of free credits for $50 a month, and a free phone if we sign up for two years.” Admittedly, the Next G coverage is excellent, but the majority of people out there just don’t think it’s a good deal at the moment, unless you live out in the sticks, in which case your non-landline communication options are limited to Telstra or UHF Radio anyway.
Increasingly, however, people aren’t bothering with landlines, or if they have one, it’s purely so they can get ADSL.
Video calling hasn’t been a huge success here, either- the technology is here and it works, but Telstra, Vodafone, and 3 have discovered what people have been saying all along: They don’t necessarily want the people they’re on the phone to being able to see what they’re up to or whether or not they’ve got makeup/pants on, had a shave, actually at the cricket (and not at home in bed with the flu like they told the boss), and so on…
Incidentally, In the past I’ve seen Coke machines which you could use a Telstra cellphone to pay for drinks from at shopping centres in Brisbane. From what I heard though, there were concerns about kids using their parent’s Telstra phones to buy bottles of Coke, running the bills up astronomically (A bottle of Coke per day would add around $50 a month to the phone bill), and I haven’t seen any in quite some time now, FWIW.