It seems to me that maintaining miles of copper and fibre wire under the streets is much more expensive and resource intensive than keeping a few radio towers up and running. Or does it cost big bucks to send out those high watt signals? Yeah, right. I’m convinced my phone company is reaming me! Can consumers ever expect a fair deal?
Maybe the phone companies are still paying off their initial infrastructure costs?
Also because many phone plans include the cost of the phone.
Another Q - do people in America still have to pay to receive mobile phone calls? (ie not just while mobile roaming). If so you guys are getting seriously reamed.
Well, apparently, it isn’t. 1. Those wires are hanging above your head, not underground. 2. They rarely break, and when they do, it’s easy to locate. 3. Those wires can take a lot of abuse before they stop being useful. Additionally, it doesn’t require a lot of high-tech, high-paid employees to fix a broken line… they just drive out there, climb up in their cherry-picker, and pop in a new piece of wiring.
Conversely, cell phone towers require lots of digital “scrubbing” and translation/transmition equipment. They’re more sensitive, so if there’s a tiny glitch in the works it can cost big bucks to get it up and running again. Further, the network of phone lines can be very, very redundant in a big city… if a line breaks somewhere, the calls are just re-routed. With cell towers, however, there’s usually one a single one for a given area, and if it breaks, that’s a LOT of lost revenue for the company. Ergo, they spend a lot more money to ensure that they DON’T break.
Conclusion? No, you’re not being reamed.
[Field of Dreams Voice] If you are willing to pay it, they will charge it. [/FODV]
cell phone service is unregulated and very competative, land line is the opposite - these factors suggest that the cost should be lower for cell phone calls - which in many cases then are.
It really depends on how much you call and where you call. an example - My friend who lived in CT moved to CO. Has a regular phone and got slammed w/ long distance charges - phone bill over $100/month. He disco’d his phone and got a cell phone w/ no long distance charges and something like 2000 minutes/month for $50 - now his monthly bill is $50.
And yes we get charged for incomming if over the minute allowance - some plans have free 1st incomming minute.
One thing you have to remember is that you’re essentially making two calls (kind of).
If you call a landline from your mobile then you’re communicating with the nearest base station and that is communicating with the normal network. So your mobile provider has to cover the cost of using both the standard wiring and the transmission/reception of the cell phone signal. Hence you need to pay more.
If you call annother mobile it’s possible the land based network may still be used (to communicate between two base stations).
What I’m saying is that your cell phone still makes use of the old wiring (or new wiring they’ve put in) and the mobile companies pay for this priviledge.
In addition it does take a lot more power to send out the cell phone signals, so you’re paying for that too.
I’ll also agree with what the other posters have said. In the end you’re probably getting a good deal - and it will get better as the technology increases.
SpaceDog
AMEN!
Thats the only reason…The market will bear the price.
I worked for Tecnomen in Helsinki who manufacture the hardware and software to manage the voicemail fuction of mobile phone networks (and pager networks and prepaid networks etc.) for most of the European Telco’s.
One example:
The Value Added Services system supplies Ireland’s Eircell network with advanced VM function known as E-Merge. (text to voice, wap access etc. etc.) The system also handled all regular voicemail traffic. The system cost Eircell the princly sum of £16m and they pay £1m a year maintenance.
The system paid for itself in 6 months and has been sitting in the heart of Temple Bar since as one huge revenue generating behmoth.
No staff are employeed for maintaining the system , it just runs and runs and runs. (its just a series of thousands of mirrored HDDs with some signalling equipment and the all importanat billing and tracking HW…and it all runs on a propietary OS called TOS (Dos with extra memory managment and task scheduling features)
Any failures result in the dispatch of Techs from Helsinki (incl yours truly).
Every Voice Mail generates 3 calls.(Deposit, Retrival and Action) along with all the extra features such as message forwarding , fowarding to multiples etc. etc.
Upgrade costs to existing network to acccomodate UMS? £0
Staff costs ? £0
Banwidth costs ? £0
Cost of calls ? £0
Maintenance £1m p.a.
Revenue £Lots and Lots and Lots (in excess of £4m a quater in 2000)
If they pay it you can charge it
Umm, there’s a number of misleading statements in here, Spoofe.
First, there is quite a vast underground network in addition to the wires you see overhead. It also typically costs 3 to 10 times more per mile to install underground than overhead.
Second, underground wires are broken all the time. Usually by sloppy crews installing new underground, or mis-location by a state’s utility protection service. While it’s certainly easy to find the break, it’s extremely expensive to repair it.
Third, do you know what unionized telecom workers that service and repair outside plant make per hour? At night? On Sunday? It ain’t peanuts as you imply. It’s on a par with automotive union workers.
Fourth, you cannot simply “pop in a new piece of wire.” Copper telephone cables can have hundreds of conductors. Sorting all that out and making sure they are properly reconnected can be quite a chore. And splices and patches will deleteriously effect signal transmission, requiring filtering and amplification.
Finally, you’ve neglected entirely, fiber-optic cables. I assure you splicing fiber is quite tedious, expensive and costly (Fiber itself is quite pricey). A 288-count fiber cable can run upwards of $15,000 to splice. In addition the major portion of signal loss in fiber is at the splice junctures. Too many splices in a fiber run can cause all kinds of problems downstream. In fact, when engineering fiber runs, it is customary to store additional fiber at and between the planned splices, typically 10% (150 feet in every 1500 foot run, more for underground installations). I’m sure you’ve seen those snowshoe lookin’ things hanging between utility poles, those are fiber storage loops.