Just got this via email.
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If you have a cell phone-----
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JUST A REMINDER… 23 . days from today, cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you may start to receive sales calls. YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS. These telemarketers will eat up your free minutes and end up costing you money in the long run.
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To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. This is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You may want to PASS THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS
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Alternatively, you can go to www.donotcall.gov to be put on the DO NOT CALL list.
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This is what happens when you vote republican.
I’m certain no such thing exists on cellphone service plans in the UK; I think I may have heard of it back in the late 80s, when they were analogue and still a fairly new thing, but … wow… paying for incoming calls… how strange.
I dunno, it’s always made sense to me. You’re paying for airtime. It doesn’t matter who called, every minute I’m on the phone, the tower has to carry the signal.
Gotta pay when you call voicemail, too, for the same reason.
Waaay back in 1997 or so, my first cell phone plan wouldn’t charge for the first minute of an incoming call, but now they charge for everything. If you don’t want to be charged for a call, don’t answer the phone. Fortunately, Caller ID now allows me to see who’s calling and decide if I want to answer.
I also have more monthly minutes than I know what to do with, and any unused minutes roll over to the next month(s), so I never worry about it either way.
Yes you do, it’s called “Caller ID” and basically you just don’t answer the call if you don’t recognize the caller. Novel idea, I know, but if you think about it I figure it’ll grow on you… :rolleyes:
You’re paying to use the network during peak hours, the wireless company does not give a fat rat’s ass who started it–they’re like your mom when you’re fighting with your brother.
In the UK you do not pay for incoming calls while in your home country, and incoming calls do not count towards any bundled minutes. When you’re out of the country - and I can speak for Orange and O2, but not Vodafone, T-Mobile or Virgin - you pay the additional charges to receive international calls (the caller pays a normal rate for calling a UK mobile, you pay the extra).
Too bad if the company you work for, who you are required to be on-call for, has a private number that doesn’t show on caller ID… :rolleyes:
If someone needs me urgently enough to call me on my cell phone, they can pay for the privilege thank you very much, not me.
Actually, I really don’t care that the American companies make their customers pay for incoming calls, but it is an unusual system when compared to the other countries I’ve experience with.
In my experience, the US (and maybe Canada? don’t know) is an exception in people getting charged for incoming calls. South Africa, the UK as mentioned, Thailand, and Egypt are places I’ve personally used local cell services, and none of them charged for incoming minutes. If I have a prepaid phone, even if I don’t have any minutes to call someone from my cell phone, I could still receive incoming calls. It makes a lot of sense, especially since here in SA, cell phone plans are extraordinarily expensive compared to the US, and don’t include very many (if any) bundled minutes - and I’ve never found a “free nights and weekends” type plan. Just for comparison’s sake, I pay about $200 US for 2 cell phone contracts, one which gives me 120 free minutes a month - on weekends only - and one that gives me 500 anytime minutes a month.
Jesus, people!! Has there EVER been an email that ended with “send this to all your friends” that wasn’t total bullshit? I didn’t even bother with Snopes, and I could tell this was total nonsense before I was even finished with the OP…
This is EXACTLY the reason that we pay for the incoming call on long distance calls in the USA. It’s only fair, right? Oh, wait, we don’t.
Why are you arguing that the phone company charging for both ends of the call is a good idea? Just because it’s how it’s done to us this must be the right way? We’ve been hoodwinked by the phone companies. The same way it cost my parents $3.73 a minute to call Panama from the USA (thanks, Verizon) then when they were in Panama and called the USA it was $0.05 a minute.
The phone companies will charge what they can get away with charging for their quasi monopoly. You probably don’t need to help them argue their case.
Look, there are upsides and downsides to every way of doing something. In the US GSM phones are software locked to accept only the SIM from the provider. OOOH, terribly unfair, right? Not when you consider the phones are subsidized and incredibly cheap compared to buying the phone outright at full price and then getting the service from whatever provider you want, the current European way. Also, there’s nothing stopping US users from getting the phones unlocked (TMobile customers get this as a free service from the carrier) in order to use cheap prepaid SIMs when travelling outside the US to avoid high international roaming charges. My Samsung E105 was free with a one year contract agreement, which isn’t an issue because there’s NO way I’d change carriers because I have the best deal on cellular service available in the US. To give this perspective, the current Samsung X495 is a very comparable phone which lists on the Samsung web site at a list price of 275.00US (227.00 Euro*.)
Now let’s talk price per minute. TMobile charges fifty bucks US (41.25 Euro) for a plan with 1500 peak minutes (0700 - 2100 M-F), unlimited nights and weekends, no roaming or long distance charges in the US (a plan with 5000 peak minute, unlt’d N/W is 129.99 US/107.30 Euro). By my calculations, this works out to just around .03/minute for peak minutes, give or take a bit (.0333 for the 1500 plan, .026 for the 5K plan) which doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable cost/minute, especially when you consider that out of 1440 possible minutes per 24 hour period, 600 minutes can be used per day at zero cost (outside peak usage time). Unlimited Tmobile to Tmobile calling can be added for seven bucks a month (5.77 Euro). Unlimited text messaging is fifteen bucks a month (12.38 Euro). For five bucks a month each you can add features that reduce the cost of calling Canada and Mexico to .05/minute.
Sorry, but I can’t work up too much indignation over a business model which allows someone to use over 30K total minutes per month of air time and only pay fifty bucks a month (this is a true number, I saw the account in question, I have NO idea when this person sleeps!) especially when the cheapest landline available to me is thirty per month with taxes, fees and surcharges not applicable to my wireless account and I still have to pay extra for long distance. Vonage is a pretty good deal at 25.00/month unlimited but it’s still tied to my house, which is not where I need my phone to be.
So, I’ve put my metaphorical weenie on the anvil here–by all means, tell me what you’re paying per month for your wireless service and let’s see how terrible it really is to have your incoming calls charged as airtime!
BTW, any number which is listed in your phone book will show up on caller ID. It has to be specifically blocked before it won’t show who’s calling. If you have your company’s private number listed in your phone or SIM memory you will know who’s on the line.
*Euro conversion 1 U.S. dollars = 0.825423029 Euro, per Google this date.
Something I forgot to mention earlier - I don’t know if it still exists, but last year my mother switched her Nextel plan to one that included free incoming calls. It was slightly more expensive, but it ended up saving her a lot of money each month. So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that it could become a more common model in the future.
