International Long Distance Calls Going Mobile
Not only landlines are being replaced by mobile phones, but according to the Annual TeleGeography study of the international voice market, international long-distance calling is also moving to mobile handsets:
ceo
This meets my personal trending almost precisely. Rates are converging, such that it’s sometimes okay to call on the mobile now. Alison is from Canada, so she spends a lot of time on the phone back home still.
However, wireline operators still undercut mobile operators for international rates.
And, mobile operators do other silly things. Sprint seems typical in that Canada Long Distance is an add on (for an MRC, to allow you to get a per-minute rate, which is sorta weak). Verizon inexplicably has a set of Canada Plans. If you want to call Canada, or from within Canada, you have to have one of these very constrained plans. Which effectively limit our use of their service.
Mobile operators could increase the angle of these lines tomorrow, to their financial benefit, if they decided to.