Two Countries, Two Vastly Different Phone Bills

Three is awesome. I actually tether through my phone at work because getting ~10Mbps to myself over 3G beats sharing a 10Mbps leased line amongst about 20 offices. I always have YouTube or Twitch on in the background, etc, and never run into any problems. I pay something like £20 a month.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve always gone with the no-contract plans. I pay $35&#x2F;month for the same phone and unlimited service that one of my family members is paying $100&#x2F;month for. Really I don&#x27;t see the point of the contract plans.

I would think that one of the &quot;several factors involved&quot; may dwarf regulation: area.<p>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&#x27;t come even close), but the simple size of the problem in the US drives their infrastructure costs way up.<p>If AT&amp;T only had to cover the state of Michigan (96,000 square miles) they could probably do it for less than $60 a month...<p>I agree that we don&#x27;t have nearly enough competition in the US, but let&#x27;s not pretend that a few more &quot;harmless&quot; laws will make everything rosy and perfect.

I&#x27;ve always found it funny that it is cheaper to use my UK monthly rolling contract in America (free roaming yay) than it is to have an American contract - completely bizarre.

I would like to point out that the following part of the article is not true (she was probably getting confused with broadband):<p>&quot;Britain has forced companies to lease their networks to competitors at cost&quot;

Britain has forced companies to lease their networks to competitors at cost?<p>So anyone could just enter the market?

Just curious, but is it possible to give the costs for comparable contracts in other countries, too?

I pay 45$ &#x2F; month for everything unlimited with Straight Talk (uses AT&amp;T&#x27;s coverage).<p>And my wife pays 30$ for 100 minutes, unlimited text and 5GB data with T-Mobile.<p>even 67$ I find that pretty expensive.

It&#x27;s worth noting that the billing methods for US and the rest of Europe are very different when it comes to voice. For instance, it costs between 4c&#x2F;min to 26c&#x2F;min to call a UK mobile phone. In the US it&#x27;s &lt; 1c&#x2F;min. Outside the US, the caller of a mobile phone is generally the party footing the bill for the entire call.<p>The more interesting question I have is why would it cost 26c&#x2F;min to call a mobile phone? And since each carrier prefix may have a different cost, how do consumers keep all these prefixes &#x2F; carrier rates straight in their heads?<p>Edit: I&#x27;m looking at flowroute, plivo, and twilio.

I pay about $75 for 2 gigabytes from Verizon, so I don&#x27;t know where these numbers are coming from.

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