Two Countries, Two Vastly Different Phone Bills
nytimes.com
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To balance though, historically Internet access options were not good.. I was on dialup until about 2003, and then pretty horrific 1Mbps DSL until at least 2009 or so. The UK has done a great job at catching up somehow.
* The monthly contracts (and higher value pay-as-you-go top-ups) come with "Feel at Home" roaming -- in about 12 countries worldwide you can use your inclusive minutes, texts and data with no international roaming fees, i.e. you get that all-you-can-eat data overseas. Countries listed include the United States; on one recent 2-week trip to the USA I was able to use my iPhone for data as if I was at home with no added charges.
* British phone tariffs do not charge you for receiving text messages.
* The all-you-can-eat is capped (small print) at a "fair usage" of 25 Gb/month. Tethering is disabled while roaming overseas on "feel at home", but not prevented at home.
* If you buy a smartphone from Three, they'll unlock it at any time, for free, on request.
* In non "feel-at-home" countries they'll give you 24 hours' data (capped at 500Mb) for £5. Not as good, but better than typical international roaming fees (at £0.5/Mb in the EU and up to £3/Mb outside the EU).
Those of us who are used to this kind of cell service boggle in amazement about how backward the US carriers are.
The final irony? Three is pretty backward and expensive compared to what Estonians get from their cellcos ... the UK is by no means the best world-wide, it's just a handy point of reference.
From the Three 'small print': So in essence there is a limit of how much data you can actually consume which is up to 1000GB. All this means that you can have absolute peace of mind and enjoy all the internet you need on your smartphone, without worrying. Basically, the limit is about 1TB/month.
I can tell you that this is wrong, I've personally had months where I've used 100GB+ of data over 3G and had no problems (this is on a £15 top-up). I don't know if they throttle or not, I've never really noticed it.
> Tethering is disabled while roaming overseas on "feel at home", but not prevented at home.
I didn't get my handset from Three but I've been able to tether in Paris and used at least 2GB when I was there.
When not roaming, there is no limit on data:
> "Does all you can eat data come with any limits? The limit is how much your device can consume – if you were to actively use data or the Internet on your phone every second, of every day, in every month (and we would be worried if you were !!!!) you would, subject to the current traffic management requirements (which vary from time to time), use up to 1000GB per month. So in essence there is a limit of how much data you can actually consume which is up to 1000GB. All this means that you can have absolute peace of mind and enjoy all the internet you need on your smartphone, without worrying."
(http://www.three.co.uk/Privacy_Cookies/Terms_Conditions?cont...)
For example Straight Talk, is 45$ / month, everything unlimited. And you can use either AT&T's coverage, either T-Mobile's or Verizon's (and their phone too).
And that's for everything unlimited, you can find cheaper if you don't need unlimited.
The UK operators have 94,000 square miles to cover while US operators have a little over 3.1 million, just in the lower 48. Obviously no single carrier is ever going to cover 100% of either country (and in the US in in particular they don't come even close), but the simple size of the problem in the US drives their infrastructure costs way up.
If AT&T only had to cover the state of Michigan (96,000 square miles) they could probably do it for less than $60 a month...
I agree that we don't have nearly enough competition in the US, but let's not pretend that a few more "harmless" laws will make everything rosy and perfect.
I can go to US and use unlimited data for no extra charge.
My first wild guess would again be regulatory: do they have to eat the extra costs involved so they provide you with the same price every month?
Nope, only one network does it (the same network in the article) and it is one of their many great features.
The all-you-can-eat nature seems to include voice as well as data abroad, but I haven't seen any mention of international calling. Calling another UK number I'm sure works as normal, but presumably you still pay the regular rates if you call a US number? They certainly do if they call you. If you're just visiting the states for a week or two that's not nearly as big a deal (use the free local calls from the hotel phone to order pizza), but longer trips (school or business) would still involve meeting a larger group of people and become cost-prohibitive (for both parties).
Combined with the limited number of customers who would be traveling internationally at all and likely the ability to get some sort of bulk-purchase agreement with whichever carrier in the US they use and they're probably just happy to eat the (relatively) limited expense to get the added customers.
Like I mentioned in another comment, it also plays heavily into our hatred of limits. If I want to skip off to NYC for the weekend, I don't want to have to figure out what to do about my phone first! The "don't worry about it, we've got you covered" approach is probably working out really, really well for them, even for the large majority of people who never travel... because they might, one day. In the meantime they keep paying every month.
Probably the real reason for the lower price is that all networks have pretty similar coverage, so the only thing to pick between them is price. Maybe there is also the fact that PAYG was very popular here in the past, so consumers just expect lower prices. Oh, and we don't have to pay the subsidy-tax for unlocked phones.
For example, in an EU country like Greece, I can phone a UK number for a maximum of 18p/minute. If I happen to travel near the border with Turkey and connect via one of their networks, there's no regulatory maximum price and the cost jumps to 69p.
I can go to US and use unlimited data for no extra charge.
There is a charge; it's part of your contract package. I'm sure it's a fantastic deal and for a traveler who uses mobile data in the US, it makes a lot of sense. But Three aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The charge for this data is part of your phone plan. Three (or another network) could provide an alternate package that didn't provide 'free' US data for a lower monthly cost.
Imagine if your cell phone required that you pay some outrageous roaming fee or get a special temporary pre-paid package if you drove out of NYC into NJ.
Edit: Typo.
In very dense areas they have to put in more cells, deal with the fact that there is a lot of metal around, multi-path propagation, more difficulties getting towers sited, etc.
In rural areas I think the cost has more to do with topography than anything else. In a mostly flat area that has an occasional mountain that's taller than anyone else, you can space towers far apart. In the Appalachian mountain region, however, you have a network of ridges that are all about the same height, so you'd need to run power and fiber to the tops of all the ridges - you might as well just run FTTH to all the homes, except you couldn't charge $10 a GB for FTTH.
Anyway, it's a moot point. Rural areas are cheap to cover. Stick a macrocell up, microwave some backhaul in from another tower (until you hit the nearest fibre line) and jobs done. Cities are much much more expensive - costs more to put the masts up, need many many more masts and complex frequency allocations, buildings blocking the line of sight, etc. I'm sure that rural capex/opex is a very small percentage of Verizon/AT&Ts budget compared to all the thousands of new 4G sites they're putting up in urban areas.
"Britain has forced companies to lease their networks to competitors at cost"
So anyone could just enter the market?
Better question, why would anyone ever build a network if they are prohibited from making a profit?
Keeps the competition going and benefits users.
Though there are a lot of cell/network sharing agreements in the market (to various extents - some are actually cell roaming but some are just sharing backhaul/fibre/the physical towers):
O2 and Vodafone Orange and TMobile (merged to form EE) Three and TMobile (may or may not include ex-Orange sites, not sure).
A phone isn't included in the contract (the contract can be stopped anytime) but my provider (Free) also sells phones on credit, say an iPhone 5s for 49€ one time payment and then 16€/month over 24 months.
That makes a close equivalent of the US contract, for 38€/month or about 50$/month.
Also, in reality I'm paying 4€/month for this contract for the first 12 months because of a promotion back in June.
No contract, unlimited data, unlimited minutes and unlimited texts (but no phone): 10€/month. On a 30 months contract with everything unlimited and an iPhone 5s will costa about 35€/month. Which means abput 50$/month.
And my wife pays 30$ for 100 minutes, unlimited text and 5GB data with T-Mobile.
even 67$ I find that pretty expensive.
The more interesting question I have is why would it cost 26c/min to call a mobile phone? And since each carrier prefix may have a different cost, how do consumers keep all these prefixes / carrier rates straight in their heads?
Edit: I'm looking at flowroute, plivo, and twilio.
Edit: these are wholesale prices, so there will be some overheads for whoever provides it to end users, but the crazy termination fees in the UK are long gone.
It might be that wholesale rates are capped but it clearly isn't pushing prices down for consumers who want to call into mobile numbers.
Considering Plivo charges 1.2c/min for US numbers as a benchmark, the difference between US and UK numbers is 1.45c/min or... 0.88p/min, exactly the wholesale cost pretty much. So I think it is working.
Another thing to consider is that off-plan call rates are certainly high, but since you could get a better plan for less than the cost of an off-plan call, you won't be making many of them.
Generally all carriers are covered by any plan minutes so you don't have to worry about differing charges. Ironically though, in the UK, calls to freephone numbers are mostly not included in plans so they do cost money...