Counting the cost of mobile calls

Phone companies are constantly dreaming up ways to increase our bills, writes Diarmaid Condon

MOBILE phones have become a necessity of modern living, but the animosity that exists towards service providers is remarkable.

In a perfect world, if you were looking to purchase a mobile phone, you should be able to visit the website or a shop of each operator, see which one offered the cheapest calls, pick a handset you like, and buy it from the operator offering the best value.

After all, call time on a mobile phone network is a utility. Like electricity, you should just be able to figure out how much it costs to make a phone call and choose the operator offering the best value.

That’s the perfect world scenario. So what happens in Ireland? Well, obviously mobile phone companies are not capable of being trusted of telling us how much a phone call is going to cost, so it is left up to an external body to do this for them.

ComReg, the statutory body responsible for the regulation of the electronic communications and postal sectors, offers a service called CallCosts.ie, funded by the taxpayer, to enable us to make a modicum of sense from the offers of different mobile phone operators.

If we can’t compare prices, what does CallCosts.ie do that we can’t? It uses assumptions, apparently. The model assumptions section of their website reads: “Where possible industry data has been used to develop the assumptions listed below.”

Basically, the assumptions wade through the list of gibberish behind which the mobile phone industry hides the fact that they charge too much for making a phone call, sending a text or accessing data services.

If you doubt for one minute the level of obfuscation operated within the industry take a look above at the results generated from putting random information into the CallCosts.ie calculator.

None of the results are easily compared and all have caveats attached. It is simply farcical and, of course, we pay the price.

Of course the main method used to chain users to a particular mobile operator is the dreaded contract. These generally vary in length from 12 to 24 months and regenerate every time you change price plan or upgrade your phone — basically anytime you do anything.

You could, of course, opt for a prepaid phone but this brings you to a whole new level of over-charging. You may think that the contract is of no consequence, that you’ll just break it if you find a better deal, but it’s not quite that simple. We asked a number of operators the ultimate consequence of breaking a contract.

They weren’t very forthcoming, possibly suspecting that there was a desperate dash for freedom in train. Despite auto-mailers telling us that our query would be dealt with “within 24 hours” only one bothered to reply at all.

This one stated that it could “confirm that contract penalty charges will apply on any bill pay account cancelled before the end of the contract”.

It was, however, “unable to confirm if the customer will be listed as a defaulter in the credit bureau””

The Money Advice & Budgeting Service (MABS) informed us that the standard procedure for defaulting customers is to pass the debt on to a debt collection agency, which will torment you for payment.

Failing this, an application will be made to have the debt listed against your credit rating.

Which brings us to the aggravated assault of roaming charges. These were the bane of every traveller’s life until the EU tried to rein them in. Some operators now offer roaming charges at exactly the same rates as national calls.

Nothing has happened in the interim to make the transit of a phone call vastly more affordable, so we have to presume that we were being taken to the cleaners for as long as the companies involved could get away with it.

Now that this particular ruse has been rumbled, they’ve moved the focus to data, which it appears will now also be subject to an externally forced reduction in prices. The EU plans to bring roaming charges further into line with national tariffs.

Just an insight for any mobile operator representatives who may be reading this, in case you weren’t aware of the problem — it’s very simple — we’re being overcharged. It doesn’t matter which operator we choose, or which ‘price-plan’ we’re on — we pay too much for simple communications and we all know it.

Operate transparently and drop your prices to an acceptable level and everybody will be a lot more complimentary when the subject of the mobile phone comes up in conversation.