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."

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[Zocalo]

...here! [reuters.com]. Not too hard, is it?

My view...

[kunwon1]

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.

Re:Of course! Different costs

[LurkerXXX]

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.

Re:Aha

[plague3106]

FYI...what you call SMS is probably refered to as 'text messaging' here. And we've had that a few years also...but maybe not before Europe or Japan.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:My view...

[Wyatt Earp]

Just for some numbers, and I think it'd be good for the discussion if someone pointed to all the numbers, not me, I've got finals...

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geo s/ nl.htm
Telephones - mobile cellular - 12.5 million

Telephones - main lines in use: - 10.004 million

Re:Revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

Those radio cards arn't free. Nor is the radio planing required before you can even erect those radios. The manpower and planing requirements of getting those cards installed and connected to your network isn't zero-sum.

Come to that, you'd be very lucky if you could just swap out one radio for another and maintain a usable signal. Radio planing is complicated; the best cell tower location for one type of radio at any given frequency may be totally useless for another type of radio. So your simple "just swap the radios" isn't anywhere near as simple as you seem to think it is.

Yeah I work for a company that supplies radio planing and network management software to telecoms operators.

Re:Revenue

[Aardpig]

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?

Re:Aha

[LWATCDR]

"This is not surprising. European technology is waaaay ahead of american technology. That's because the Americans are run by the bean-counters (because of the obsession with the bottom-line), who are never on the forefront of technology, while in Europe, people in charge have a more broad education than bean-counters who, there, are mere lackeys instead of the feared rulers they are in the US."

I suggest you read the article.
SMS has never caught in the US because it costs less to actually talk on your phone in the US than in Europe.

From the article
--Americans traditionally have paid to receive mobile phone calls and tend to be less free about giving out cell phone numbers.

--American mobile subscribers get an allotment of minutes for a monthly fee and competition led to packages offering free nationwide calls nights and weekends.

--Europeans buy more limited packages -- especially geographically. Despite investigations by the European Commission mobile phone companies in Europe charge as much as one euro per minute to send or receive calls abroad.

Yea you may get to talk to anyone in your country but the countries are smaller than many states in the US.
The article also goes on to talk about how much more profitable cell service is in Europe than in the US. Seems like bean counters to me.
The Bottom line is in the US you get few "features" and less total coverage of the total country. One the plus you get a lot more geographical area as local and it costs much less per call to make actual calls. SMS is popular in the EU because it is CHEAPER then making a call. In the US SMS is not popular because it is MORE EXPENSIVE than making a voice call. Ring tones? Gee let me pay so I can have a song instead of a ring on my phone? This is a great leap forward? It seems to me that the EU customers are paying a lot more for phone service than the US customers are.
Sure they have a bunch of added features "ohh... Ring Tones". But to actually make a call costs a lot more.

Arrrrg! Fear the /. dittohead!

[gelfling]

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?

Re:Revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is really preventing this kind of free market from operating in Europe, either. Actually there are plenty of diversity in available call plans, at least in Finland. I think there at least half a dozen plan sellers (there are only couple physical network operators, though, and they sell their network capacity to others) with like dozen different plans each, including pre-paid, practically flat-rate (with large enough amount of minutes, SMS or data), pay per minute/use, and combinations of these. Nobody has suggested receiver to pay for things yet, though, although it might be implementable.

I think a limiting free market in the standard adoption is a good idea, though. There have been three incompatible mobile phone generations in Finland this far (starting around late seventies, I think), but they have been generations, not really competitors. And it works. Take a look at Sonera coverage map [gsmworld.com], for example. The country has five million inhabitants, most of them in most southern fifth of its ~1200 km north-south length, and highest third is mostly populated by roaming reindeer, but still, it's pretty hard to find a spot without GSM coverage at least couple kilometers from the location.

Re:Aha

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to the parent, regarding european phone technology: In the 1940's, the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia all agreed to destroy whatever phone system Europe had. :-D

Re:Revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Of course! Different costs

[Catiline]

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....

Re:Aha

[tfb]

You wrote (based on the article):

SMS is popular in the EU because it is CHEAPER then making a call. In the US SMS is not popular because it is MORE EXPENSIVE than making a voice call.

Unfortunately the article is grossly oversimplifying the situation (to the point of being wrong).

It's true that SMS was once cheaper than calls for many purposes, and this may have been instrumental in the rapid takeup of SMS. But SMS costs have gone up a lot, and it's not really cheaper any more - I think an SMS costs me 10p for 160 chars, while I get something like 1500 minutes per month for L20/month, so about 1.3p/minute. I can say a bunch more than 160 chars in a minute!

So in fact SMS isn't cheaper than calling in Europe in any reasonable sense, so it clearly can't be more popular because it's cheaper. It might have initially become popular because it was once cheaper, but its continuing success is nothing to to with cost differences.

The truth is that SMS is not like calling someone at all. What it is more like is personal email which is always with you. In particular SMS is no more like phoning someone than email is like phoning someone - there is some overlap, but the two things are really completely different.

So a better way of thinking of it is perhaps that in Europe there is a pervasive personal (in the sense that it travels with you everywhere, `email' culture, while in the US there isn't, or if there is it's a very different one.

Re:Arrrrg! Fear the /. dittohead!

[Buelldozer]

Evertime any topic about $foo penetration comes up I have to bust out these same stats. It appears that they are not teaching you Europeans how damn HUGE the United States is!

The whole damn European Union (post 2004) is less than HALF our size! You also have almost twice the number of people!

It doesn't take a Mathematical Genius to figure out why Cell Phone / Broadband / Product DeJour penetration is higher THERE than HERE.

Read the stats and get educated...or didn't they teach you how to do that in prepatory school?

European Union Landmass: ~4 Million Square Kilometers (http://www.dfat.gov.au/ani/chapter_8.html)

United States Landmass: ~ 9.6 Million Square Kilometers (http://www.mongabay.com/igapo/world_statistics_by _area.htm)

EU Total Population: ~ 454 Million (http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.europe.html)

US Total Population: ~ 295 Million (http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html)

Re:My view...

[ElNeo]

Some numbers from Norway:

People with cell phones: 96% (July 2004 - source [www.npt.no])
Houses with landlines:
2001: 91.6%
2004: 84.8%

In 2004 15% of all SMS trafic was premium SMS (ringtones, televotes, chat services etc)

A total of 1.7 billion SMS-messages was sent in 2004. The average subscriber sent 68 SMS/month. (Aprox 5 million people/subscribers in norway) This is 16% more then in 2003.

Nov 4. 2004: 59% of all norwegian corporate leaders belives they will abandon landlines.
source [www.tu.no]

The cheapest call planes are:
Monthly cost: 0
Price pr/min: 0,13$ (0,79 NOK)
Price pr/SMS: 0,06$ (0,40 NOK)

All providers have more or less the same coverage, which is very good. If you can drive there - you are more or less garanteed coverage. Lost calls, or breakdown seldom/never occur.

I guess this is more or less the same for all of North-Europe.

the poor part of Europe

[gr8dude]

I live in Chishinau, the capital of Moldova, a little state between Romania and Ukraine (Moldova is the poorest country on the continent). I could say that mobile phones are very common here. Usually, one has a landline and a mobile; from all the persons I know, only one let the landline go... And that's because he works for a mobile operator, and has unlimited free calls ;-) Pupils and students make the majority of mobile-phone owners. An interesting trend - _short_ calls are more popular than SMS'es. Short - because the operator charges you for each used second; and by default, you get -16 seconds from your account, even if you talk less. So people came to the conclusion that 16 seconds are more efficient than 160 characters an SMS can hold (and in practice, this seems to be right). I myself prefer SMS'es for several reasons:

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)

Re:Lousy article

[Solandri]

I suppose the wide use of GSM probably makes the hardware cheaper, which would make more and smaller cells economical.

The problem with poor coverage in the US in sub/urban areas was due to poor early implementation. There was a significant analog network already in place, so the companies rolling out digital networks weren't necessarily the ones developing digital networks. The companies who were developing digital networks often oversold their capabilities to the phone companies (yeah blame it in marketing). The phone companies then built networks based on overoptimistic specs, resulting in the towers being too far apart. They've been paying for that mistake ever since, spending oodles of money adding new towers or relocating towers. But since that's only done in locations where they get frequent reports of poor coverage, a lot of marginal sites are still around. Capitalism requires well-informed purchasing decisions in order for it to work well, and those early purchasing decisions weren't well-informed.

As an aside, GSM (the old one) uses timeslices (TDMA) to separate out phone calls. So each tower has a maximum number of calls it can handle. If an area is densely populated such that they're expecting to hit that max limit frequently, they had to position the towers closer together to begin with. A large chunk of the US networks (Verizon, Sprint, a couple others) use CDMA, which doesn't really have a set-in-stone per-tower limit since all the transmissions can happen simultaneously. As a result, those companies initially tried to place their towers as far apart as they'd been told by marketing that they could. That resulted in marginal and patchy coverage. Despite the rough start, CDMA has proven to be the better (albeit patented) technology. The new GSM systems are based on CDMA.