Today I'm going to rage about roaming charges.


What happens if we consider everything as data? Calls as simply voice data, texts as data, picture-messages as good-old data. You get the picture.

Lets assume my home-internet connection is fairly standard. Lets also assume it has a fair usage policy of 40Gb/month (pretty standard for the price with BT, TalkTalk, Virgin etc), 40GB daily is about 1.333Gb, which is (very approximately) 15kbps of 24/7 usage.

Price wise, I pay about £40pcm for this connection. Well, it's included with TV and calls, so the actual internet package costs about £18pcm, lets call it £20 for ease of use. £20 per 40Gb is 50p/Gb or 0.048p per Mb.

Now, I was in Sweden last week - The Menzies Lounge at Stockholm Arlanda Airport to be precise. Vodaphone reliably informed me that calls will cost 75p, plus my minutes to make, and 75p to receive. SMS messages cost 11p and I get 25Mb for £2 daily (£1 per Mb thereafter).

Wait what?

I'm going to ignore the data charges - no normal person uses mobile data rates abroad. The kind of person that uses mobile data charges abroad arrived into foreign on their own jet, or is struggling to find signal off Monaco in their yacht. So not me then. I'm going to look at the call charges. Because wow.

Again, considering everything as data, we have a reasonable comparison with VoIP services such as Skype. A voice call with Skype uses anything from 24-128kbps (source). According to ZDnet, an average cell phone call lasts 3 minutes 15 seconds. That's 195 seconds at between 24-128kbps - lets guess that we're not going to enjoy the 24kbps end, and the 128kbps end would require some seriously good internet from both parties. Lets assume a nice, round, 96kbps stream. It's more than enough for decent voice quality (Mumble, a gaming-base VoIP client I use is perfectly usable down to 20kbps, so 96 is adding some overhead).

96kbps is 0.7Mb per minute (8kb = 1Kb, 1024Kb = 1Mb, 60 seconds in a minute). 0.7Mb, at my home internet rates would cost me 0.034p.

Did I mention that with VoIP software, I can call anywhere in the world for free?

At 75p per call, I would have to be on the phone for 22,000, That's 22 Thousand minutes, or just over 15 days, constantly before I broke even. Though this is moot given that I only have 600 minutes on my contract, I'd actually never break even.

Why does this enrage me, I hear you ask? Free market economics and all that. They charge what people will pay.

The companies don't enrage me (that much). The People who absently pay these charges because 'it's just the way things are'. These people enrage me.

tl;dr: Mobile Phone companies rip you off. As if you didn't already know.