On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 02:42 , Petri Ojala wrote:
>> But if we had true phone portability, handset subsidies would have
>> to go away. And then we'd all be paying around 30,000 yen for a
>> new phone, right? Whereas now I can go down to my local Bic Camera,
>> grab a 504i, and....
>
> Yes, with subsidized phones it's always all the other users that pay
> your
> new phone in their usage charges ;-)
Exactly.
Assume, you buy an unsubsidised phone in the UK for use on prepaid for
-say- 190 pounds. The phone is good for at least two years,after which
you can probably fetch at least 30 pounds on the second hand market,
thus the average cost per month for the handset would be 7.04 pounds per
month. There are of course cheaper handsets, which should turn out to be
in the order of 5 pounds per month (ie 149 retail minus 20 resale
divided by 24 months).
For the majority of users this is in no relation to the the monthly
plans.
On most prepaid services in the UK you pay as little as 5p (or 7 cents
US) but seldomly more than 10p (or 14 cents US) per minute. The
equivalent of line rental is worked into the first three minutes per day
(on VodaFone) or first 15 minutes per months (Virgin).
Before handset subsidies came down the charges were 35p per minute,
that's a staggering 350-700% compared to what they are now.
Imagine, they would offer you a free TV set but the monthly CATV charges
go up 700% and when you want to rent a video you pay 1400 instead of 200
yen rental per day.
Of course that is all for the benefit of the TV industry to bring out
new models and provide new programming as surely they would be unable to
survive otherwise and thus it must be to the benefit of consumers,
right ?!
regards
benjamin
Received on Thu Jun 13 10:08:37 2002