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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

Do cell phone minutes work differently in India? I was under the impression that I pay for minutes on my phone even when receiving a call. In which case I don't understand how hanging up after the first ring only to have someone call me back would save anything.

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The US and Canada are the only countries I know of where you pay for spam (as in, pay when receiving a call or a text).

There might be others, but in advanced economies (at least) the concept is generally found ludicrous.

Add Singapore to the list.

Mobile pricing in Canada is entirely mental. The charges carriers charge here is crazy compared to europe or asia. I had hoped that when we went from 3 to 6+ carriers things would improve, but they haven't. :(

Mobilicity has $12.50/month unlimited calling plans now... I wouldn't say things haven't improved. If you use the upstart carriers you're paying a lot less. What hasn't happened is that Rogers or Bell or Telus have reduced their prices to match. Presumably they are anticipating that at some point they can simply acquire the new carriers and fold them in, like Fido or Virgin Mobile.

Nope, in India you only pay for the calls you make. I was actually surprised by your system, where you can make someone pay by just calling.

It gets worse. You can even get charged for receiving a text message.

And you have to pay the cell phone company to block numbers (in Canada).

Really? Why do North Americans put up with being the only ones in the world to pay for receiving a call???

What recourse do we have? All the NA cell carriers do it, so we can't vote with our feet.

Because North Americans know that when they call somebody they pay a single, predefined rate to call that person: the rate from their location to the destination area code.

I don't have to know if I'm calling a mobile or a landline. In fact, a lot of people in the US pay a flat rate to any number in ANY area code in the country.

Let me pick a country I call often from my plan's list. Germany. I see two rates for landlines (49 for Telekom and 49115 for civil services), and then six rates for mobiles based on five major carriers and a sixth catch-all that is 5 times more than the others.

For kicks, let's look up India. Nice. 18 rates.

That's … not how it actually works if you are in Germany. Typically you get a flatrate or minutes to landline and two prices for mobile calls: One for calls to your carrier, one for calls to other carriers. You might, for examle, have 120 minutes for calls to people with your carrier and 19 cent/minute to other carriers (and if you go over the 120 minutes).

It's actually not so complicated, but it's certainly often a good idea to know which carrier someone is using when you are calling them on the mobile phone. There are, however, also plans that treat all carriers the same.

In Canada you generally pay long-distance rates (~$0.40/minute) when you: -Call a number with a different area code (and sometimes the same one because some area codes are very large and actually have multiple zones) -When you call a number in your own area code but you aren't in that area code (when you're in another city) -Receiving calls when you're outside of your area code

Most people are on multi-year contracts with substantial break frees (in the $200 range). There are also charges to change your number and so on and so on...

Uh, here in Portugal I pay exactly the same - 8 eurocents/min - for any network, both mobile and landline. And we don't pay for receiving calls.

If I have a cell phone number in Toronto, move to Montreal, and call somebody across the street in Montreal... I pay the rate from Toronto to Montreal.

I know because I was surprised with $400 cell phone bills maxing out my credit cards after a few months over there, thinking the exact same thing, that I paid "the rate from their location to the destination area code" - which we do not.

You pay for receiving a call too. You just pay differently. Nothing's free.

There's no "paying" vs. "not paying" conflict here.

In a sense, you are right. However, US and Canadian total average bills are far Higher and have more probability to be much higher than the contract fee. In the EU, mobile operators have had legislation forcing then to simplify and lower call costs. In the developing world, costs and fee models are whole orders cheaper.

I have no problem about the cost of buying a local mobile anywhere I travel in the world, the the US being the exception (have not yet travelled to Canada, which is shameful as I have family and friends there).

I found the comment of all the US carriers operating the same policy and therefore not being able to walk away. Surely that is grounds enough for a complaint about price fixing, using the rest of the world as a case study?

One huge advantage of our system in the US is that it gives us a good excuse to scream bloody murder when legislators try to pass bills allowing telemarketers to call cell phones. (This just happened, as a matter of fact.) If incoming calls were free, cell phones would become a lot less usable due to telemarketing spam.

In Sweden, you can join a list of numbers that marketers can't call. And with TrueCaller, it's pretty easy to screen marketers. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but your system is just crazy.

There is a Do-Not-Call registry in India; where you can register your number if you do not want telemarketing calls.

Can I register my UK number with them. The standard way to avoid the UK Do-Not-Call registry appears to be to enlist an Indian call centre to make the call for you (and spoof the number too - though why the phone company even routes calls with spoofed caller ID I'm not quite sure.)

That's not really an advantage. If service providers and marketers were regulated reasonably, you wouldn't have to pay for receiving calls AND you could prevent telemarketers from calling you.

Here in Finland there's a number you can call to register your phone on a do-not-call list. It doesn't stop all callers I guess, but I have had no telemarketing calls since registering about a year ago, so it is pretty effective. I do get an SMS or two from my service provider every few months, but I'm not bothered enough to do something about it.

The UK has a similar system. It's pretty effective. the loophole is that telemarketers are not allowed to call, but market researchers are allowed to call.

Plus, in Australia at least, the calling party pays a premium to call the mobile phone (essentially charged at a long distance rate, to a separate 'mobile phone' area code). So in reality, spam callers self regulate anyway: they know what area codes are mobiles and they know that those area codes will cost them.

Thanks to recent rule for telemarketers in India, we get almost zero telemarketing calls/sms if we register for do not call service. My phone was surprisingly silent from the day this rule came into effect. Ironically, this whole thing was proposed and pushed through by government because our finance minister got a telemarketing call offering a personal loan when he was debating about some thing in parliament :D

In Australia, the idea of paying to receive calls is rediculous. Sure, it's not quite like that on the carrier end. But we consumers only pay when making calls.

Same in UK. Was surprised at North American system!

Same here in Norway. I think most (all) European countries do the same.

The only exception is if you are in another country. In that case the caller only pays as if the call was domestic, and the other has to pay the extra costs. The providers are required to allow you to set a maximum limit on your costs for your phone use outside your country, so you can't be surprised by huge bills.

The limits are regulated by the EU law and include Internet access (data transfer).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_re...

There's also the catch in the US system.

When you hear the message saying 'blah blah, leave a message after the tone'. Those seconds are charged to the caller.

Add up all those millions of seconds and the networks are rolling.

We all know what to do when the person is not there. I don't need to hear a 15 second message telling me yet again what to do.

I think it was David Pogue who wrote something up on this: press "1 * #" in that order, slowly, listening after each press. Depending on the carrier, you'll skip the message eventually.

This happens in most countries - I think it's Vodafone in the UK which reads out the recipient's phone number very slowly before letting you leave a voicemail.

It goes something like "Welcome to the Vodafone voicemail messaging service for 0... 7... 7... 4... 5... 9... [the rest of the number]... the person you have called is unable to answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone."

Call me presumptuous, but I know the number of the person I've just called, and don't really need to know how to use an answerphone.

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