7 ms·

It amazes me that most of you don't question the fact that you (north americans?) are paying to receive phone calls. Here (Spain, but I think it applies to all

It amazes me that most of you don't question the fact that you (north americans?) are paying to receive phone calls. Here (Spain, but I think it applies to all the euro zone) we just do not pay to receive calls, which seems much more sensible to me. How would you feel if some random mailguy knocked at your door and when you opened it he threw a package at your hands and immediately charged you for (part of) the delivery? This is exactly how charging to receive phone calls feels to me! How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ajhurliman 9y ago
It's either a paltry amount of money to accept a call, or completely free (unlimited talk). Data is what costs the real money.
- PietdeVries 9y ago
  What kilburn is referring to is that the business model that telco's use more or less stimulate this type of calls. If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer. Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay. Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer They do have to pay money; initiating a call isn't free. The receiver has to pay a tiny amount of money if they're not on an unlimited plan, but it's so small that it's not worth considering separately from the annoyance of receiving these calls in the first place.
    - Sleeep 9y ago
      That's easy for you to say. Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much. There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.
kelnos 9y ago
This isn't true anymore since pretty much all the wireless carriers in the US offer unlimited voice minutes (and often SMS as well) as their standard postpaid plan.
- smellf 9y ago
  True, but presumably your carrier is still paying for the call. If the transaction were reversed, then the robocaller or their "carrier" (or whatever the equivalent is in robocaller land) would have to pay, and the profits would crumble.
  - adventured 9y ago
    If I'm X telecom company and I want to inject a billion roboscam phone calls into AT&T's mobile network, I'm going to pay them for that privilege. These phone calls are no longer expensive, generally speaking, which is one of the reasons it is now cost effective.
  - chriscappuccio 9y ago
    The access tandem is where long distance calls are switched into the local phone network for a given LATA. Local phone companies and long distance providers all buy into the same access tandem in order to connect into the geographically fixed market. When calls are switched across an access tandem in the US, it's the initiator of the call that is billed per minute. The receiver at the other end of the tandem switch may pay a fee to the switch operator to receive the RECORDS of which other company initiated a call in to them. That way, they know who to go after and bill for each incoming minute! Tandem operators typically don't provide this info during the call signalling, even though they could. As you can imagine, per-minute call billing is not always settled between tandem players. They can block each other based on company ID alone, and often this requires cooperation from the tandem operator as well. Some of the per-minute rates are incredibly high. The flat-rate long distance phone providers are obscuring the fact that some areas are extremely high-cost to terminate. This system has sprung into high per-minute cost billing in high-cost areas (rural LATAs) so that people operate free dial-up (in the 90s anyways), free phone conference lines, and even "free international calls" all taking advantage of the incredibly high per-minute rate by billing the maximum rate permitted in their LATA (typically not higher than the highest per-minute tariff posted by the incumbent local monopoly). This highly regulated old-school system seems so antiquated in the face of the Internet, but it survives because the tandem is the one place where all providers can interconnect, and this turns out to be the hardest part of the puzzle to work around. In the age of the internet, we could come up with something better :)
sudojudo 9y ago
>How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it? They spend big on politicians, for even bigger profits. Just look at the mess our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is creating with Net Neutrality at the moment (and for the last few years, over-and-over). Nearly all of the crap that consumers have to put up with in the states is due to lobbyists, and the telecom industry doesn't cut corners in that department.
adventured 9y ago
You should probably ask before doing that (subtle backhand, with the self-tout). Most North Americans are not paying to receive calls.
- pluma 9y ago
  "It's free. Just $49.99/month"
tzs 9y ago
As others have already pointed out, carriers nowadays mostly do flat rate voice service. When cellular bandwidth is more limited cellular carriers did usually have per minute charges. It wasn't actually receiver pays. It was each person pays their phone company for carrying their end of the call. It didn't matter if you were the receiver or the initiator. Note that this is the same model that is used in most of the world for internet service. I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.
- crypt1d 9y ago
  > I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service. I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.
  - hueving 9y ago
    >I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. This isn't true. You still get charged for random stuff scanning you over the Internet (unless you are behind NAT); or even worse, being on the receiving end of a DoS.
    - crypt1d 9y ago
      hmm most SOHO ISPs charge a flat monthly/yearly rate, so that point doesn't really stand.
ctwo 9y ago
I'm not from the US, but I have worked with the US telecoms industry. The original reason for this was due to the numbering plan. In most countries a special 'area' code was chosen for mobiles, however in the US they decided to just allocate mobile numbers in the existing area codes (NPAs). At least in the early days of cellular it cost the providers more to connect a call to a cell phone and so someone has to pay it. In a numbering plan where it is possible to tell a number is mobile just by looking you can put that cost onto the caller, but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra. So that extra cost was put onto the cell phone user accepting the call. This is hearsay from colleagues so may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense to me.
- Kluny 9y ago
  > but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra This was a tricky bit of grammar but I believe it's 100% correct.
  - npsimons 9y ago
    Well, it's supposed to be "hard done by", but that doesn't make it much better. I'm personally pleased to see a more sophisticated way to phrase something, but unfortunately it's not a common idiom these days (at least state side), so it can be a little confusing.
    - danellis 9y ago
      In what way is it "more sophisticated"?
- rasz 9y ago
  You can migrate your landline number to a cellphone plan in Europe. There is no way to know whats on the other side when you are making a call.
  - dx034 9y ago
superflyguy 9y ago
If you are roaming (for example, you take your Spanish mobile to the UK) and receive a phone call (from a friend in Spain) you pay for that (because your friend can't be expected to know you're abroad).
- felipelemos 9y ago
  Not anymore. At least between the 28 Europe Union members. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Not exactly, you can still get charged if you spent the majority of your time in the last four months abroad.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I realized I wasn't clear: they can start charging you, not charge for calls already made :) The relevant rule: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently-asked-questions-roam-home#272 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently...
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    But that's not the point. Take a country where this doesn't apply as example, then.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  This always seemed weird to me when texting someone. How am I to know that this will cost me a euro for 160 characters instead of being free, when it's to a national number, just because they chose to have a holiday in Bangladesh this weekend? But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.
mrgriscom 9y ago
The converse is that in Europe the caller pays (or used to pay?) more based on whether they're calling a cell phone or a landline. Why should I care what kind of phone the person on the other end has? That seems like their burden, not mine. This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  The upside of cellphone calls being more expensive in the EU (or at least in my country) is that this makes mobile telemarketing calls much less convenient, to the point I can't remember the last telemarketing call I received, if I ever received one on the cellphone. OTOH, my land phone stays disconnected 24/7 because of telemarketers.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    The only mobile telemarketing calls I receive are actually from my phone company. Whenever someone calls me and upon, answering, they say the magic words "Mobilcom-Debitel" (the company's name), I immediately hang up without saying anything else and block the number. They change numbers about once a month, though.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bluGill 9y ago
When I was in Europe 15 years ago it amazed me that people there asked if I had a cell phone: friends told me they were not going to call me on my cell phone (work provided with a Europe number) because they were caller pays and they didn't want to pay that much. Do you still have such a strange system where you will refuse to call someone because you pay who knows how much? In truth caller pays makes some sense in a world where call time is expensive. However the world is different: call time is dirt cheap. Caller pay means (unless of course the government steps in) that you have no idea what you are going to pay for a call and thus don't make them. Last I heard in the US the average person pays twice as much [per month] for their cell phone plan, but in turn they talk on their cell phone 5 times as much.
- dalore 9y ago
  Look at this way, do you have a set of free numbers (like 0800 or some prefix)? Every country has a prefix of free numbers, prefixes for local call numbers nationally etc. Basically you know how much you're going to pay for calling someone based on the number you dial. Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix. Calling international costs more because of a prefix.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    I have free calls to anywhere in the US, Canada or Mexico. I can call any number in any of those 3 countries and talk as much as I want for no extra charge. (except for a few pay per call "services" but that is not a phone fee that is the caller collecting the money and easily blocked). For a small fee I can get the same for both "cell phones and land lines in 30 countries"; and land lines in 70 countries. The reason I don't get cell phones cell phones in those 70 countries is they are caller pays. Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
    - 9y ago
metaphorm 9y ago
what makes you think we pay to receive calls? there are different service plans but the vast majority of them are either flat-fee unlimited calling, or they bill you to make calls (prepaid minutes, for example).
- jclardy 9y ago
  Pretty much all minute based plans in the US charge minutes for both outgoing and incoming calls.
nobodyorother 9y ago
Regulatory capture.
adrianmonk 9y ago
Here in America, we drive on the right side of the road, which is the only logical way and totally not just an arbitrary thing that seems right to me because that's what I'm accustomed to. I always wondered, in countries that do it the other way, how do the governments justify that to their people?
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  That's a terrible "analogy". The logic of "don't pay for events that you have no ability to control" is apparent to everyone, as is the arbitrariness of road direction.
  - adrianmonk 9y ago
    You don't pay when the phone rings. You pay once you decide to answer it and the call is established. That requires positive action, so you certainly have control. I could just as well say that being able to receive calls at any location is a great convenience, so the logic of paying for that is obvious. But I won't, because there are a lot of different ways to see it, and none is obviously right or wrong.
tdburn 9y ago
At this point most people pay for Data and not Talk time on cellphones

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ajhurliman 9y ago

It's either a paltry amount of money to accept a call, or completely free (unlimited talk). Data is what costs the real money.

PietdeVries 9y ago
What kilburn is referring to is that the business model that telco's use more or less stimulate this type of calls. If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer. Think of it: the caller has the will to talk to someone - why should (at least in the past) this someone pay for that? The Euro-zone does it the other way round: you want to talk, you call, you pay. Either way, in both situations with call volumes going down and people switching to data-type connections you see the price of calling/receiving calls drop sharply and as listed above the money telco's make comes from the data plans.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > If a telemarketeer has to pay for setting up a call, rather than the end-user for accepting it (no matter how small the charge is), then placing millions of automated calls all over a sudden start costing money to the marketeer They do have to pay money; initiating a call isn't free. The receiver has to pay a tiny amount of money if they're not on an unlimited plan, but it's so small that it's not worth considering separately from the annoyance of receiving these calls in the first place.
  - Sleeep 9y ago
    That's easy for you to say. Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much. There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.

kelnos 9y ago

This isn't true anymore since pretty much all the wireless carriers in the US offer unlimited voice minutes (and often SMS as well) as their standard postpaid plan.

smellf 9y ago
True, but presumably your carrier is still paying for the call. If the transaction were reversed, then the robocaller or their "carrier" (or whatever the equivalent is in robocaller land) would have to pay, and the profits would crumble.
- adventured 9y ago
  If I'm X telecom company and I want to inject a billion roboscam phone calls into AT&T's mobile network, I'm going to pay them for that privilege. These phone calls are no longer expensive, generally speaking, which is one of the reasons it is now cost effective.
- chriscappuccio 9y ago
  The access tandem is where long distance calls are switched into the local phone network for a given LATA. Local phone companies and long distance providers all buy into the same access tandem in order to connect into the geographically fixed market. When calls are switched across an access tandem in the US, it's the initiator of the call that is billed per minute. The receiver at the other end of the tandem switch may pay a fee to the switch operator to receive the RECORDS of which other company initiated a call in to them. That way, they know who to go after and bill for each incoming minute! Tandem operators typically don't provide this info during the call signalling, even though they could. As you can imagine, per-minute call billing is not always settled between tandem players. They can block each other based on company ID alone, and often this requires cooperation from the tandem operator as well. Some of the per-minute rates are incredibly high. The flat-rate long distance phone providers are obscuring the fact that some areas are extremely high-cost to terminate. This system has sprung into high per-minute cost billing in high-cost areas (rural LATAs) so that people operate free dial-up (in the 90s anyways), free phone conference lines, and even "free international calls" all taking advantage of the incredibly high per-minute rate by billing the maximum rate permitted in their LATA (typically not higher than the highest per-minute tariff posted by the incumbent local monopoly). This highly regulated old-school system seems so antiquated in the face of the Internet, but it survives because the tandem is the one place where all providers can interconnect, and this turns out to be the hardest part of the puzzle to work around. In the age of the internet, we could come up with something better :)

sudojudo 9y ago

>How do telcos justify this to you? What's the reasoning behind it? They spend big on politicians, for even bigger profits. Just look at the mess our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is creating with Net Neutrality at the moment (and for the last few years, over-and-over). Nearly all of the crap that consumers have to put up with in the states is due to lobbyists, and the telecom industry doesn't cut corners in that department.

adventured 9y ago

You should probably ask before doing that (subtle backhand, with the self-tout). Most North Americans are not paying to receive calls.

pluma 9y ago
"It's free. Just $49.99/month"

tzs 9y ago

As others have already pointed out, carriers nowadays mostly do flat rate voice service. When cellular bandwidth is more limited cellular carriers did usually have per minute charges. It wasn't actually receiver pays. It was each person pays their phone company for carrying their end of the call. It didn't matter if you were the receiver or the initiator. Note that this is the same model that is used in most of the world for internet service. I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service.

crypt1d 9y ago
> I've never understood why people find it weird to use that model for phone service but not for internet service. I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. On the other hand you can get a phone call from anyone really without you previously agreeing to paying the cost of the call.
- hueving 9y ago
  >I think its because an internet connection has to be initiated by you at which point you give your consent to be charged for it. This isn't true. You still get charged for random stuff scanning you over the Internet (unless you are behind NAT); or even worse, being on the receiving end of a DoS.
  - crypt1d 9y ago
    hmm most SOHO ISPs charge a flat monthly/yearly rate, so that point doesn't really stand.

ctwo 9y ago

I'm not from the US, but I have worked with the US telecoms industry. The original reason for this was due to the numbering plan. In most countries a special 'area' code was chosen for mobiles, however in the US they decided to just allocate mobile numbers in the existing area codes (NPAs). At least in the early days of cellular it cost the providers more to connect a call to a cell phone and so someone has to pay it. In a numbering plan where it is possible to tell a number is mobile just by looking you can put that cost onto the caller, but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra. So that extra cost was put onto the cell phone user accepting the call. This is hearsay from colleagues so may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense to me.

Kluny 9y ago
> but if it looks like a landline then the caller would feel hardly done by getting charged extra This was a tricky bit of grammar but I believe it's 100% correct.
- npsimons 9y ago
  Well, it's supposed to be "hard done by", but that doesn't make it much better. I'm personally pleased to see a more sophisticated way to phrase something, but unfortunately it's not a common idiom these days (at least state side), so it can be a little confusing.
  - danellis 9y ago
    In what way is it "more sophisticated"?
rasz 9y ago
You can migrate your landline number to a cellphone plan in Europe. There is no way to know whats on the other side when you are making a call.
- dx034 9y ago

superflyguy 9y ago

If you are roaming (for example, you take your Spanish mobile to the UK) and receive a phone call (from a friend in Spain) you pay for that (because your friend can't be expected to know you're abroad).

felipelemos 9y ago
Not anymore. At least between the 28 Europe Union members. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming
- icebraining 9y ago
  Not exactly, you can still get charged if you spent the majority of your time in the last four months abroad.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I realized I wasn't clear: they can start charging you, not charge for calls already made :) The relevant rule: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently-asked-questions-roam-home#272 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently...
- lucb1e 9y ago
  But that's not the point. Take a country where this doesn't apply as example, then.
lucb1e 9y ago
This always seemed weird to me when texting someone. How am I to know that this will cost me a euro for 160 characters instead of being free, when it's to a national number, just because they chose to have a holiday in Bangladesh this weekend? But as for the receiving end, paying for receiving calls and texts only applies during holidays. It's not the standard case so whatever. Apparently that's different abroad.

mrgriscom 9y ago

The converse is that in Europe the caller pays (or used to pay?) more based on whether they're calling a cell phone or a landline. Why should I care what kind of phone the person on the other end has? That seems like their burden, not mine. This whole line of argument is about ten years stale, anyway.

squarefoot 9y ago
The upside of cellphone calls being more expensive in the EU (or at least in my country) is that this makes mobile telemarketing calls much less convenient, to the point I can't remember the last telemarketing call I received, if I ever received one on the cellphone. OTOH, my land phone stays disconnected 24/7 because of telemarketers.
- majewsky 9y ago
  The only mobile telemarketing calls I receive are actually from my phone company. Whenever someone calls me and upon, answering, they say the magic words "Mobilcom-Debitel" (the company's name), I immediately hang up without saying anything else and block the number. They change numbers about once a month, though.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bluGill 9y ago

When I was in Europe 15 years ago it amazed me that people there asked if I had a cell phone: friends told me they were not going to call me on my cell phone (work provided with a Europe number) because they were caller pays and they didn't want to pay that much. Do you still have such a strange system where you will refuse to call someone because you pay who knows how much? In truth caller pays makes some sense in a world where call time is expensive. However the world is different: call time is dirt cheap. Caller pay means (unless of course the government steps in) that you have no idea what you are going to pay for a call and thus don't make them. Last I heard in the US the average person pays twice as much [per month] for their cell phone plan, but in turn they talk on their cell phone 5 times as much.

dalore 9y ago
Look at this way, do you have a set of free numbers (like 0800 or some prefix)? Every country has a prefix of free numbers, prefixes for local call numbers nationally etc. Basically you know how much you're going to pay for calling someone based on the number you dial. Yes I agree if you don't know what you are going to be charged just by calling is wrong. But that's not the system, calling a specific set of prefixes let's you know what it's going to cost. So calling a mobile you know it's going to cost more since it had a mobile prefix. Calling international costs more because of a prefix.
- bluGill 9y ago
  I have free calls to anywhere in the US, Canada or Mexico. I can call any number in any of those 3 countries and talk as much as I want for no extra charge. (except for a few pay per call "services" but that is not a phone fee that is the caller collecting the money and easily blocked). For a small fee I can get the same for both "cell phones and land lines in 30 countries"; and land lines in 70 countries. The reason I don't get cell phones cell phones in those 70 countries is they are caller pays. Once again, caller pays used to make sense. However now it is just a money making scheme for cell phone companies that hurts those of you who have it.
  - 9y ago

metaphorm 9y ago

what makes you think we pay to receive calls? there are different service plans but the vast majority of them are either flat-fee unlimited calling, or they bill you to make calls (prepaid minutes, for example).

jclardy 9y ago
Pretty much all minute based plans in the US charge minutes for both outgoing and incoming calls.

nobodyorother 9y ago

Regulatory capture.

adrianmonk 9y ago

Here in America, we drive on the right side of the road, which is the only logical way and totally not just an arbitrary thing that seems right to me because that's what I'm accustomed to. I always wondered, in countries that do it the other way, how do the governments justify that to their people?

thaumasiotes 9y ago
That's a terrible "analogy". The logic of "don't pay for events that you have no ability to control" is apparent to everyone, as is the arbitrariness of road direction.
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  You don't pay when the phone rings. You pay once you decide to answer it and the call is established. That requires positive action, so you certainly have control. I could just as well say that being able to receive calls at any location is a great convenience, so the logic of paying for that is obvious. But I won't, because there are a lot of different ways to see it, and none is obviously right or wrong.

tdburn 9y ago

At this point most people pay for Data and not Talk time on cellphones