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From the WirelessNorth submission engine, Andreas writes:

Subject: Incoming Calls are paid(??!!!)

I just arrived in Vancouver from Europe only to find out that in this part of the world you have to actually pay for your incoming calls! And on top of that you get to pay over $30 for a mere 100 min. I thought it was a joke but it turned out it is true.

It is important because people should know that is not the way it is done in developed countries since 1997.

Not only that Andreas but some carriers will charge you long distance fees on top of that even for incoming calls.

Why is this? Well our understanding (but internet please correct us we’ve got this wrong) is that the difference in europe is that carriers pay to each other (and earn) termination fees for incoming calls landing on each other’s network whearas in North America this doesn’t happen (due to the legacy of free local calling on POTS. So in europe the carriers have incentive to encourage incoming calls while in North America it would just be lost revenue opportunity to give away incoming. That being said, a lot of the carriers do offer some kind of free calling plans to numbers on the same network, or some clever folks out there hang on to legacy plans that do offer unlimited incoming.

Hint: free incoming, if you can get it, is a great thing to combine with a service like Jajah that acts as a clever middleman to turn all your calls into a local incoming callback.

I’ve long felt that cell phones were one of the biggest cons going, and could never understand why people would pay so much for such crappy voice quality. I’m being a bit of a lug-head here, but we all know how inferior cell phone quality is to everyday PSTN, whether it’s dropped calls, crackly voice or no 911. Of course mobility is all about convenience, and obviously people are willing to compromise voice quality for walking and talking. I’ve also long wondered why mobile carriers don’t offer a premium cell service where you can approximate PSTN quality. I’m sure there are lots of reasons why not, but let’s get back to the story here.

VoIP, of course, is the last thing most people would think about for improving the mobile voice experience. It’s had such a bad rap historically, but people like me have followed it long enough to know that under the right conditions, not only is VoIP on par with PSTN, but when it’s end-to-end IP, it’s a superior experience. Who wouldn’t want this in their cell phone?

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Idea #6787 for starting a disruptive carrier business. Voice 2.0 use VOIP for vastly better voice quality.