I have heard that in the USA mobile phone users pay for calls when someone phones them. Is this for real? If so, you would only give your number to about 2 people, wouldn’t you?
Yes.
No, because Americans will die if they don’t receive a cell phone call every 3 minutes, so it is a matter of survival to spread your number to as many people as possible. Some people are so close to death, they even announce it on YouTube.
To be more specific, most American cell phone plans charge for minutes of use. In most cases, a minute is a minute is a minute, regardless of whether it’s local, long distance, or interstate, outgoing, or incoming. Most plans have some fixed number of minutes included in the base monthly fee; when those minutes are used up, additional minutes of use are billed on a per-minute basis. So unless the monthly allowance is not exceeded, the subscriber pays the same amount, regardless of whether they use one minute, or 1,000 (assuming a 1,000 minute allowance).
Yeah, that’s how our phone plans work, and yeah it’s stupid, but no one seems to be offering any other type of plan, so what are you gonna do?
I am careful about who I give my cell phone number out to. If you’re my close friend, you’ll probably get it, but if you’re just an average Joe Schmo, you get my land line at home.
How do text/sms messages work?
Grim
I have to pay for all calls and messages I receive (unless included in my basic included amount, as SuperNelson described, which still counts as me paying for it). I have always considered this to be a very fair way of doing business. After all, it is my phone company who is doing the work of keeping me connected and such, and how will they stay in business if I don’t pay them? What about a person who receives many calls but hardly calls anyone – why should his telephone usage be free?
I give my cell phone number to anyone, provided it is someone who I’m close enough to that I don’t mind paying for the call. This includes all family, all friends, only those business associates who would need to reach me even during “off hours”. When filling out a form which asks for my cell phone number, I leave it blank if it is a warranty form or credit-card application, but I fill it in if from my doctor or school. So far, I have not gotten any “junk calls” from unsolicited salesmen. Also, the phone companies themselves are very cooperative: Our cell phone numbers are not available on any public phone directory system.
Similarly. You pay per text message sent or received. Although, like calls, you have plans that allow X number of texts per month. And now there are plans coming out that give unlimited calls/texts to a small number of numbers you choose (like 5). Verizon used to give unlimited calls to other Verizon mobile phones.
I think with my plan, I get as much time as I want if I’m calling someone else that has the same service provider. I think I have about 750 minutes on my calling plan, which is plenty.
Yes, some people are surgically attached to their cell phones. But not all of us. I use it for my convenience. In fact, I had a doctors apt yesterday and they asked for my cell phone #. I did not give it out. They can call me at home or at work. That’s plenty.
My Wife has such a friend. This girl lives for cell phones. Hiking in the woods? “Hang on a sec, I have a phone call.” And she uses it for a kind of half assed call waiting. My Wife was admonished once for not calling her cell phone when this girl was on her land line. It was just to chat, nothing important at all.
“If my phone was busy, why didn’t you call my cell?”
“Ummm, because I knew you where talking on your other phone”.
I think there are maybe 4 or 5 people that have my number.
I don’t even keep the thing on unless I’m traveling. Where I live, the reception absolutely sucks anyway. Leaving it on just means that the battery goes dead.
How much do you think it costs to receive a phone call?
I think we got the better deal in text messaging. I pay $5 a month to Sprint for unlimited text messaging to any carrier. Therefore I often go over 1,000 a month 
Just to add. E/a cell phone service provider differs on their minute usage plan. For example, almost all service providers have what they call Mobile to Mobile (or M2M for short) minutes. As enipla states, if you and the other caller have the same service provider, then M2M minutes kick in and you are not charged the minutes allocated in your plan. Also, almost all service providers include what they call “Nights and Weekends” minutes. If any a caller, regardless of provider, calls you on a weekend or between 9pm to 6am (in most cases) during weekdays, then your minute plans will **not ** be charged. Finally, companies, like T-Mobile and AllTel have introduced services in which you, the service user, are given the choice to select 5 or 10 phone numbers (land lines or cell phone #'s) whose usage will be considered M2M in your plan. AllTel has the MyCircle and T-Mobile has the MyFaves. Given that scenario, I can have 700 minutes of any time usage and still have 100 minutes left unused by the end of the billing cycle.
But isn’t that the way U.S. landline telephony works? Everyone pays a fixed price for having a telephone number, but no matter how many calls you recieve you only pay for those you originate.
The real reason lies in the North American Numbering Plan. It makes it hard to discern whether a given number terminates in a mobile network or a landline. Therefore a landline caller can’t be expected to pay more for a call using the more expensive wireless infrastructure, so the recipient must foot the bill.
In regions of the world where “caller pays all” you would know from the number that a call to a mobile phone will be charged at a different rate. In the U.K. for example mobile numbers start with 077, 078, or 079.
From my Swedish landline I pay almost SEK 2 per minute (30 U.S. cents/min.) to mobile phones. I would guess that would be considered very expensive in the U.S.
It’s seriously a joke. It’s designed to make you pay for more than what you use. Pricing plans here are designed to not screw you over if you go over a limit. Here in DK, you pay a minimum of 199, plus something like 1 kroner for the first three minutes of the day and then 75 oere after that. That’s it, really. Sounds cheaper than your landline for sure!
Essentially though, I’m paying 199 kroner a month for service. That is about 36 dollars. That allows me to make 265 minutes worth of calls. Now that’s less than your average American plan for the same price. However, I can also make text messages for less than 2 cents. In America you pay 10 to 15 cents for a SMS.
I dunno, I prefer to use my phone when I want to and pay the price. I hate the idea of having extra minutes or nights and weekend minutes and all of this garbage because it’s too complicated to calculate. I just want a flat fee to pay all the time for everything and I’ll live with it.
But if I want to have Data? I have to buy a 10 to 20 dollar a month data package. Basically it’s not worth it unless I want to be a heavy user. But I like to use data ocassionally (google maps on a cellphone is great) and also I like to use other services like that.
If you’re after affordability, then in the US, at least where I live,
MetroPCS $38/month gets you unlimited phone calls 24/7 to any (and from any) phone in the country, with caller ID, call waiting, and voice mail.
For $5/month more you get unlimited picture and unlimited text messages.
For $5/month more you get unlimited data.
It isn’t 3G but I am yet to see a better plan cost-wise in any other country.
No worries, however, since if you still want to complain about ridiculously expensive and complicated cell phone plans, Japan doesn’t seem to be getting better in this regard. Once you choose one of five colors and maybe ten sub-packages I recommend you don’t try to figure out how much your phone calls will actually cost unless you are an accountant. 21yen per 30 seconds between the hours of 9pm and 1am and 0.21yen per 128 bytes of data 
The real reason, as I see it, is marketing.
I remember when local calls and long distance calls were handled by the same company, so they gave you unlimited free local calls, and we only had to pay for the long distance calls. Then the govt broke up the monopoly, and the local telcos were headed straight into PR hell, because they’d die if they couldn’t start charging for those local calls, and all the customers (who didn’t appreciate the free ride they had for all those decades) started complaining that they were being charged for a truly free service.
In my view, it could’ve been avoided if they simply charged a fair price from the beginning, rather than playing games with the price structure.
We did not get free local calls. We got unlimited local calls for a fixed monthly fee. You can buy cell phone service like this in the states. Metro PCS that groman lists is one. Cricket is another such service
Use a system like Australia where the caller pays for the call.
Here people give their mobile phone number out to everyone. Why not?
I’m not sure I understand, but it sounds like you are saying that landlines in the US are billed based on the number of calls one makes? That isn’t true. In most places in the US, you pay a flat rate for a landline, and you can make as many local calls as you want, it doesn’t change your bill. You can receive any kind of call from anywhere and it doesn’t affect your bill. If you make long distance calls from your landline, you pay to make them, and the rates vary wildly. At least in my experience, people in my general age range don’t use their landlines for long distance anymore.
As far as cell phones are concerned, what SuperNelson said has always been my experience. A minute is a minute. They don’t care if you are talking to the folks next door or people in Los Angeles, or people in Orlando, and they don’t care who called who. You can be talking to another cell phone or a landline, and it all costs the same.
I don’t think I’ve ever made any overseas calls from my cell phone, at least not in recent years, so I’m not sure about that.
Because I’m going to be very annoyed when I call an apparently local (or at least simply a toll call within my area code) number that somebody gave me, neglected to tell me it was a cell phone, and I get charged for it. If cell phone numbers were immediately identifiable as such, it would be ok, but when they started allowing you to convert your landline number to mobile it screwed up that possibility.
It’s the North American phone numbering system. Cell phones are tied to local area codes. My home phone number has a 216 area code - Cleveland and its inner ring suburbs. My cell is 440 - Cleveland’s outer suburbs. There are no special cellular-only area codes or exchanges. You can’t tell whether someone’s phone is a landline or cell based on their number. The numbering system is intended to be predictable seamless - for the caller, at least.