Mobile phone costs in the US

So today I finally got my mobile phone service set up. And how mobile services are billed in the US is quite different than how it works in Sweden. The basic rule in Sweden is that if you do not make the call, you don't pay. That is, you pay nothing to receive calls and you pay nothing to receive text messages. The exception from the rule is if you're roaming outside Sweden. In that case you pay the costs for transferring the call/text to wherever you are.

This is not how things work in the US. Here you pay for incoming text messages as well as incoming calls... Always... So if I call/text my wife we have to pay for the communication twice... Actually that only applies to text messages since we have unlimited minutes because of the service plan we have but still... I don't get the logic behind this scheme. Maybe it's because I'm Swedish...

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2009
  There is no logic, the mobile phone providers in the US are crooks.

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2009
  You are right, they are quite different in Sweden than the US. Quite frankly, Sweden's mobile phone costs make more sense than the US methods.  But then again... The US companies are making much, much, more than the Swedish services.   The devil is in the details of each service plan.  Try shopping around, I am optimistic that you could find a more suitable plan based off of your needs.

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2009
  I especially like the fact that you pay for incoming messages. With phone calls you always have the option to not answer. With a text message that's not true so you can basically make people loose a lot of money by sending them a lot of messages.