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Reuters On Telephone Cultures
mamladm writes "Reuters has an interesting article about the Differences in Telephone Cultures between the US and Europe.
It describes how the different regulatory frameworks have created distinct cultures on how telephones are being used in the US versus Europe. The article mainly discusses mobile phone usage, though."
...here!. Not too hard, is it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
... already a couple of years ago when designing mobile phones (actually, they did quite a bit of market resarch on that - I participated (as a researcher)).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Perhaps the U.S. should look at how the Europeon Union did it. All the same standard = more money.
Or perhaps it's 50% more people and a 400% higher population density.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
This does a little bit to explain why my friends in the US often say "SMS? Whats SMS?".
I just recently started seeing commercials for ringtones on American TV, while it seems like 90% of European TV commercials have been for annoying ringtones for years now! I find it funny that on the American versions of the "Jamster" (Jamba in Germany) adverts they have to have a short blurb explaining what an SMS is.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Old habits will die hard. I think Europeans will continue to use the phone for messages rather than as a surrogate for being there.
Considering that the actual wattage usage of a cell phone is more than 2 and a half times as great as the same connection via landline, I find the increase in cell phones hardly something to be admired.
Just my ex-Greenpeace side kicking through though.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I know this much - I once saw a cell phone ad where the guys are at a restaurant and the one uses the pepper grinder built into his phone. Then the ad cuts in, with the narrator asking, "Want a phone with the features you need?" before breaking into a list of just utterly useless garbage. Games, ringtones, a shitty camera, etc. My only thought was that the pepper mill would have been far more useful.
It also makes the infrastructure a lot cheaper, since you're covering less area.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Wow, more EU residents have cells than US residents do. With the differences they're citing, it's no wonder, seeing as America generally has a better POTS than Europe. In the US, it costs just a little bit of money to have unlimited local and incoming calls on a land-line, plus it never has an error, ever, of any sort. So, it's not much of a surprise that the US has slightly lower cell uptake.
More money where? In corporate accounts or in people's wallets? Because the fact is that we all here envy American's cheap calls. I would love to call more, but I always feel the counter ticking in the background. And telco is a de-facto oligopoly all over Europe, with state owned companies in almost all countries and heavily regulated GSM operators who hardly compete since they know no new players would be allowed on the market.
"...The article mainly discusses mobile phone usage, though."
Well, that's the thing, then, isn't it? In the US, dirt is pretty cheap and plentiful, so land lines and wires that require poles to by strung up everywhere have predominated where the relative scarcity of space in European and Japanese cities has forced a much higher adoption rate for mobile technologies.
Tell me if I'm wrong, eh?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
"Wouldn't the higher population density cause less phone calls to be made?"
No.
"Why call when you can walk next store or just find them down at the pub?"
Why walk next store or down to the pub to try to find them, when you could just ring them and be certain they're there?
I'm a born and bred American, lived there until I was 20. I've lived in Germany for the last three and a half years. I've made some trips back to the states, a few months here and there.
In the US, for us common rabble, it's "Do you have a cellphone?" Whereas, in Europe, it's "What's your number?" Most people assume that if you're giving them a telephone number, it's your cell phone number. And they will not ask you if you are capable of receiving SMS, they will assume that you are. It is more common in Europe for someone to have a cell and no landline than it is for someone to have a landline and no cell.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
America's landline system was superior to Europe's. This was partly due to the fragmentation of the European market and partly due to the socialized phone companies in most countries. The Europeans did not make the same mistakes with wireless, resulting in a better quality of serverice for wireless. In general Europeans jumped to wireless faster because they were disatisfied with their landline service, compared to Americans. This has given Europe an initial edge, however in the long run I believe the US approach is better. Standardization has short term advantages, but in the long term it is more important to promote technological development.
You know, the population density argument can only be taken so far. Yes, South Korea has an advantage over the US in general for implementing a new system. It's not just population density there: the simply fact that it's small does the trick.
Now move to Europe. If they are to implement standards as a whole, they need to reach all of the European rural areas, just how it hasn't been reached in the US. As the article explains, those areas have been reached there. Whether you're in no-mans land in Scotland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Malta, Lithuania etc... you're connected.
Again my point is that population density doesn't matter much-- land area itself matters more. While a higher population in rural areas (high population rural areas?) would increase incentive for a company to spread there, that only matters so far. Every bit of land you don't cover, even where the population density is zero, will make you lose customers in the more populated areas. I'm from a rural area in Maine. I live in upstate NY. I did not buy a Verizon plan because it did not service my Maine location. Think I'm the only one? Nah.
Oh yeah oh yeah. Poland too.
It just annoys me that if governments hadn't got so greedy with the UMTS licenses and grabbed all the money that should have gone into deployment, we'd probably be even further ahead, maybe even ahead of japan too.
Let's just hope they've learned something for the next time round: tax them _after_ the money is made, don't cripple things by charging it all upfront, while everyone else catches up.
sudo ergo sum
Underholdning.info
It's nothing new, all this has been well known throughout the industry for years. Two points that are missing from the Reuter's text are VoIP and Wi-Fi. Both phenomena are a direct result of America's (more) free market approach. And in both cases the explosion goes on in the US with Europe slowly catching on. It's overall cheaper to communicate if you are in the US then in Europe. So, dear Americans, don't whine, you've got a better deal anyway even without fancy ringtones ($2 each) or other stupid stuff like that.
That's why in the U.S. it's been illegal for the telemarketers to call you on a cell if you also had a landline. They had to call the landline number. Now that we have a national 'Do Not Call' list for telemerketers, it's easier to give up your land line, knowing you won't get a bazillion telemarketing calls if you list your cell on the DNC list.
This has absolutly nothing to do with GSM versus other networks but with network coverages.
Americans have made voicemail a way of life, where it often replaces the busy signal. A conversation can be supplanted by voice mail exchanges. Europeans often skip voicemail, although they have sophisticated versions. Their mobiles automatically send a note saying "1 missed call," and tell them who called. People call back even without a message.
Funny, I've had a cell phone in the US going back to 1997 and this feature was on the first one I owned with AT&T. It was also on the second and third one I owned with Sprint, and the fourth one I owned with T-Mobile.
--Americans traditionally have paid to receive mobile phone calls and tend to be less free about giving out cell phone numbers.
This has less to do with the regulatory environment than with call screening and the consideration that if you are calling me on business, I'd rather you talk to my receptionist first.
Overall, this article featured a few stats that could have barely populated the bottom right graphic of the USA Today Money section and stretched it out into a three page article. Fluff journalism strikes again.
Why walk next store or down to the pub to try to find them, when you could just ring them and be certain they're there?
Guess I just know my friends are always at home or the pub. Sometimes I forget not everyone has lazy drunk friends like I do.
Evolution or ID?
Perhaps, you should picture the person on the landline sitting on a plastic chair, in an air-conditioned house, with the lights on. I, on the other hand, prefer to use my mobile phone only while sitting in a bird-sanctuary, on a weathered rock, warmed by the sun's rays.
Besides, energy consumption shouldn't be nearly as great a concern as the process by which that energy has been generated.
To the best of my knowledge, most member states have sold their telephone companies - certainly, the big ones (UK, France, Germany) have done so. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of a country in the EU with a state owned telephone company - I'm not saying one doesn't exist, I just don't know of one.
The "heavily regulated GSM operators" aren't that heavily regulated in most juristictions, and most countries have at least four nationwide mobile phone operators (two on 900MHz, two on 1800MHz), with 3G operators opening in addition to these. Far from knowing no new player could enter the market, most operators are putting up the auctions of 3G frequencies at the moment that's resulting in precisely that - new players being given an opportunity. The original opening of PCN (1800MHz) by the UK government in the early nineties was specifically to create an opportunity for new operators to emerge, and the rest of Europe followed suit.
The situation isn't directly comparable to the US - I have a choice of about five or six operators where I live in Florida, but "nationwide" is still a relative term. Verizon, Cingular, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Nextel (soon to become part of SPCS) would probably all describe themselves as nationwide (and would probably be the only US operators who reasonably could do so), but all have massive holes in their coverage maps, frequently omitting entire, relatively populous, counties while covering the neighbours. It's only because of transparent roaming and operators gobbling each other up we're seeing anything approaching usability in these networks. Sprint PCS is rapidly becoming a service network for operators like Verizon, Nextel and SPCS are merging, T-Mobile is a prime takeover target, probably for Cingular.
Outside of that four and a half, there's a bunch of ultralocal operators who seem to live in some era where mobile phones are just cordless phones with a longer range, frequently covering single cities, for all intents and purposes aimed at an entirely different application.
I don't want to suggest everything's great in Europe, it isn't. Operators in the US are generally now offering better plans. Much of this is because of the monetary culture that's different between the countries rather than regulatory. Europeans tend to be interested in spending as little as possible, resulting in large numbers of users choosing $20-30 a month "plans" (frequently pay-as-you-go) with very few minutes. Americans are more interested in trouble free/worry free usage, and have to pay for incoming calls, so tend to spend more, which gives the operators disproportionally more money after they've bought their infrastructure, so allowing them to offer more bundled minutes and features like unlimited calling.
But that's entirely seperate from regulatory pressures.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And I'd like to know what magic allows a phone to work at "the bottom of a salt mine in Poland." It doesn't matter whether you use GSM or a mix of three different standards, it's difficult to push a signal through tons of rock (which was alluded to the problem on "trains", which I take are really subway trains).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
When I studied aboard in Ireland (Spring, 02') I was absolutely amazed at how mobile phones kept people connected and governed most young peoples' social lives.
Personally, I was very anti-mobile phone when I arrived there, but I was told that you really needed to have one if you wanted to be at all socially active. My first weekend there was a home stay with a family in rural Limerick (rural meaning they lived on a farm, had cattle, but no shower). The entire family had mobile phones, even their 10 year-old daughter.
The flat I stayed in (with 6 other Irish students) didn't even have a land line, (ironically enough, it was wired for LAN; however, I was the only person with a laptop) everyone used mobile phones. The crazy thing was, they rarely actually TALKED to each other, they simply sent text messages back and forth. Most of their plans were pre-paid, so, to get the most use out of their Euros, they would simply text each other.
The funny thing is, now that I'm back home and with a phone, despite my x amount of minutes a month for free and free "in calling", I still text message all of my friends.
I guess I'm just proud of my l337 phone typing skillz I accrued while abroad.
Respect It.
This article is BS. It basically says "Americans get more minutes of talking for less money than Europeans, but don't use the call management features as well, because the US government has only recently started leaving telcos alone, while Europe's governments have meddled with their telcos". What does any of that have to do with the US GSM dropping calls all the time? How about the unreliability of US callerID, because there's no universal inter-telco standard?
Consider the effects of US market saturation with landlines before mobiles appeared, compared to Europe's many "first time callers" without any phones when mobiles were first offered? How about Europeans many languages, in which people can more easily communicate with short SMS messages, rather than demanding interactive multilingual voice calls? Or the role mobile phones play in teenage consumer cultures, in car-hungry America vs. poorer teenage Europe?
No, none of those answers would blame the government for interfering with culture. Some of them might even blame corporations for bad service! And when you get your info from a London telco marketer and an FCC PR flack, why would you bother to validate that solid-gold wisdom "from the horse's mouth"?
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make install -not war
I, on the other hand, prefer to use my mobile phone only while sitting in a bird-sanctuary, on a weathered rock, warmed by the sun's rays.
True, but if you are one of those gits who needs to SHOUT into the mobile you will have very few friends in the bird sanctuary.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Sorry, but they have not been sold. They have been merely privatized, which means that they have been converted into corporations with shares traded on the stock market. However, many of the shares still belong to the states either directly or indirectly (belong to other companies where the states have some share, in many cases majority). As an example in France representatives of the government are directly on the management board of France Telecom, presumably "private" enterprise now. And some shares belong to Aerospatiale which is an aerospace corporation heavily controlled by the state. The same model has been followed in Spain (Telefonica), Germany (Deutsche Telekom) or Poland (TP). In all those countries the concept of "national operator" exists which means that market is regulated in such a way as to ensure that no real competitor to the "national operator" would be allowed to grow. I don't know how it looks elsewhere, but I suspect that the situation is very similar.
So, on the surface you can argue that these are not state owned. However, operational reality is that these are de-facto politically protected monopolies in their respective markets. Now, these are merging into bigger behemoths on the European scale, again with help from politicians on all levels.
Result? Much higher costs of calls over fixed lines, expensive Internet access.
We could argue here about the meaning of the adjective "heavy". From my point of view heavy regulation is for example the fact that in some cases (e.g. Poland, as far as I know also Czech Rep.) licenses issued (effectively agreements between the state and the operator) included a promise from the state that for a given period of time no new cellular operators would be allowed to enter the market. Has anyone in unregulated, free market that kind of peace of mind? Even Microsoft, so many times called a monopoly, doesn't have this kind of protection.
Also, from the point of view of marketing departments of a GSM operator playing in such a market its competitive options are very limited. All other (two or three) operators use the same technology, same phones with same capabilities over the same bands with very similar coverage. You can cut prices only a bit, because doing so dramatically is out of question - it would create a price war on which everybody would loose in the end - and the margins are huuuuuge, believe me. So the only way you can try do differentiate from your competitors is by creating various add-ons - hence the premium SMS-es, which serve as micro-payment medium for many services, ringtones and images etc.
That's the classic planned-economy/market-economy trade off. We see it everywhere from tractor factories to airlines to health care.
In the UK, my phone bill was around 20 pounds (~$40) per month. Upon moving to the US, my first month's bill was $250. Cellphones in the US are a fucking rip off, free market notwithstanding.
Precisely what aspect of the cellphone market in Europe is a 'planned economy'? Have you ever actually been to Eurpoe? Or is your knowledge -- like many Americans -- based on the Epcot Centre at Disneyland?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It encourages cuthroat competetion, encouraging people with cellphones to not self-delude themselves into thinking that most calls are incoming. (By definition, for every minute of outgoing call, there must be a minute of incoming.) This encourages businesses to keep prices very low.
Also, adding on a special billing infrastructure for sender-pays, even for local calls, would have been a hard sale when the cellphones were first being produced. Since local calls are free in the US. Making it cost the caller to call early-adoptors on a cellphone is going to be a non-starter --- especially when the value of the cellphone is for the recipient.
Besides, why use a cellphone over a landline unless it has more value for you --- ergo, worth paying to both receive and send calls.
Early on they used to charge you for receiving a call in Australia - that model never took off fortunately.
In the Philippines (where I am now) to send an SMS costs about 0.5 US cents. Very cheap, though the moment you make a voice call, it hits your wallet hard.
SS7 has its negative side, they also hit you for the time spent waiting for the call to be answered. 20 rings to answer, that'll be an extra 100 peso thanks - just for listening to the tone. I suspect they do this all over the world though.
someone once told me they hate the term "land-line" but is there a more descriptive term?
Sure, there are any number of words. You can call it a telephone line, for starters. Everybody understands that.
POTS is clear to me but not obvious to others
Avoid acronyms. Always. It's just a good rule of thumb. Once your grandmother knows an acronym, it's okay to use it: DVD, ATM. Until then, use actual words. Don't say "POTS." Say "telephone line."
They pay nothing to receive mobile phone calls in their home country.
The result of this? MUCH higher charges to the caller when calling a mobile number vs a land line. Call a Spanish landline from the US - 4 cents a minute. Call a Spanish Cell Phone from the US - 30 cents a minute. Call from within Spain and you pay about the same price, and same difference.
What the US calls Number portability, where you move a number from a land-line to mobile, is impossible here, and will remain so indefinately.
When I explain to Spaniards that I had nights and weekends free, Verizon to Verizon calls for free, and 25 minutes a day of talktime for 40 Euros a month, they crap themselves. I don't care how many text messages they might send, the system here is years (or Dollars, depending on your viewpoint) behind.
What I can't believe the article didn't mention was VOIP. I'm not talking about Spanish companies offering VOIP, but US Companies competing internationally, offering local numbers everywhere. I can't wait for Vonage to come in and crush stodgy old Telefonica. And it's starting to happen. I can get a Vonage account for 15 dollars a month, and add a Spanish number to my account for $5 more a month. Spaniards won't know or care who I get my service from - they'll just call the Spanish number and I'll pick up the phone. Outgoing calls to Spanish numbers, both land-line and mobile, is about the same through Telefonica or Vonage. Calling anywhere else in the world is cheaper on Vonage. The savings to hassle ratio isn't enough for most Spanish Companies yet, but it's a matter of time.
One final aside - one of my consulting clients was an elderly businessman formerly in charge of running ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) in Spain, as a partner to Telefonica - Spain's AT&T, if you will. During the Franco era, when state monopoly meant state monopoly, getting a new landline to a business took - get this - 16 months. John told me the story of how an old fraternity brother called him up and explained that he was opening a GE branch office in Spain, and they needed a telephone line. John, perhaps having more power in the phone business than anyone else in Spain, used all his abilities and got the lead time for a phone line down to 6 weeks. Admitedly, customer service has improved since the 60's, but not much.
Yes, but you are still effectively paying $100 (or so) per month for those calls, whether you make them or not. Just because it's called "phone rental" or whatever, doesn't mean that's where the money goes. From the telcos point of view, it's the average that matters, so while theoretically everyone could max out and pay 2c per minute, in practice it's going to be higher than that.
The other side of things, is how many people *really* look at their usage to see whether they have the best plan for their needs instead of going with the herd. For instance, I used to have a mobile on a great monthly plan at ~£20/month with a sizeable number of free minutes and SMS messages included, after which they would be billed at a given rate. All well and good, except that I never used up my allowance since I would always use face-to-face, landline/VoIP and finally email/IM in preference to my mobile and the bulk of my mobile use was people calling/SMSing me. I've since switched to a pay-as-you-go plan which has cost me less than £20 so far this year, sure it's very "teenage-girl" style mobile telephony, but that £200/annum saving still buys quite a lot of beer! :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Uh dude, Europe the continent is pretty damn huge too and my family can use the same phone w/o roaming charges anywhere from Norway to North Africa from Spain the the Ukraine. That's about twice the number of people as the US or didn't they tell you that at Rush school?
Actually, the land-line network in Finland reached probably 99% of its potential customers in continuously inhabitated residences well before GSM catched on. "Continuously inhabitated" has a sort of catch here, though: Finns have hundreds of thousands of summer cottages at the countryside, and reasonably small portion of those have had a landline, traditionally (Most or at least major portion lack electricity, too, but that doesn't bother people either. Lack of sauna would annoy mightily). But on the other hand, those cottages are usually populated only for a month in a year, and many Finns go there to keep away from technology for a while. Permanent habitation with landlines tend to exist like one kilometer away, though.
There's no denying that landlines, usually implemented using air cables, are expensive to repair after the storms that tend to hit them at least once a year, but everybody that wanted a phone had it decades ago in Finland anyway. (I believe my family had one almost a century ago, and the location was certainly on countryside.)
Almost but not quite. US regulations say no marketing calls to those who pay to receive.
I'm just waiting for these "free to our customers" plans to get wide enough that its' economical for the marketers to have a set of Sprint/Nextel/US Cellular/etc phones so they can call those numbers, too....
Do you like Japanese imports?
My battery always dies if the conversation is longer than a minute or two //old phone...
Usually I am in class, or in some other place where I dont want to 'break the silence'
Most of the messages i send are tech-related. I guess it is a lot easier to write PC-HUB-> WO-O-WG-Bl-WBl-G-WBr-Br than explain it orally :-)
Other interesting facts:
The country's population is of about 4.4 million, of which at least 700.000 work abroad. [This number should be a lot greater... because the latest census stated that there are 3.3 million in the country]
It is a lot cheaper for a person abroad to call to a mobile than it is to call a fixed phone. Why don't they use email? That beats me... But in the beginning of the mobile-boom, the relatives of those who work in foreign states were the first ones to get mobiles.
And another thing we have (and probably nobody else) is the ping-system. I was surprised to find out that they don't have a reliable caller-ID system in the states, but here we do (and even my landline caller-ID can identify those calling from mobiles, or from different countries). So, what are the pings all about? When you call someone, wait for one ring then hang up. The person who received the call knows that its either "i'm home, call my landline" or "yes" or "i'm in front of your house, come out", etc. The point is that the 'ping' is not taxed... And people figured out how to take advantage of that. In fact, some of my friends can live for a whole month with only 30 seconds in their account :-))) unbelievable!
Another fact you might be interested in, is that we have 3 operators for the 3.3 million. Two here, and another one in a part of the country which is sort of problematic (they claim independence, bla bla)
The saddest poem
DVD and ATM are not acronyms
Least useful nitpick ever.
It is completely acceptable to use an acronym.
It is only acceptable to use acronyms which are in common usage. All others should be avoided.
POTS is far more descriptive than "telephone line"
Typical nerd rationalization. "It doesn't matter if no one understands me. I'm more precise!"