USA! Calls should be charged at both ends, internet should be charged at both ends, and if a company like Youtube is making too much money Comcast should be allowed to fine it for not sharing the profits it gained on the bandwidth it already bought.
Try getting a different plan. T-mobile's unlimited data plan with limited monthly minutes is $30 / month. Their unlimited-everything plan is $50. They nominally charge extra for tethering, but tethering worked just fine for me without actually buying the "service". No idea what "smart phone plan" means.
Summary: the problems you're experiencing don't seem to have much to do with what country you're in, so much as your belief that buying a plan with a ton of bizarre extra costs makes sense.
It does if you're used to paying $20 for a prepaid burner and having it last 3 months with normal use. Coming in the other direction I find it jaw dropping how little Europeans pay for cell usage.
Yeah I was kinda surprised in the US, I got a "burner" for about $20 (at Walgreens, IIRC), charged it with $10 (ok), and it barely last me 3 weeks with minimal usage. Minimal meaning most people calling me. But apparently that doesn't make any difference.
I did enjoy the fact that this simple dumbphone had a very easy-to-use "tip calculator", making it easier to adapt to the local customs :) (until I found out that apparently tip percentage are calculated before-taxes, not over the full bill?)
I don't dispute this; I have similar feelings wrt the price of cell service in China (it's cheap). But the parent comment was complaining about a situation that didn't make sense even in the US, and attributing it to the US.
The smart phone plan was a requirement for buying subsidized non-feature phones from AT&T until last year. they dropped that in favor of the tethering scam. I'm still managing to avoid both. but it's a pain.
I'm actually only on AT&T because they scammed me via my employee. They advertise 30% discount. So you go there, sign up for 2yrs. It takes exactly 90 days for a bill to show up with the discount when you have a FAN id (corp discount). why? because after 90 days you can't cancel the 2yr contract anymore, and then you learn that the 30% only applies to voice, for the first line. so you get $6 instead of the $30/mo you were expecting.
i would have gone with t-mobile. and the 2yrs are ending now, so i might switch.
What carrier is this? Back in the day I recalled my old carrier stating 1-800 did not count against your minutes. Now I have unlimited so doesn't even matter
the 700min is already too expensive. $60 + $30data + tax and ridiculous fees (like $4/mo for the ferederal universal access fee. like AT&T even uses that money to give phone access to everyone one...)
On cell phones. This is for the same reason as you have to pay for receiving calls while roaming internationally on cell phones - basically the difference is a historical fluke based on numbering plans and how billing are done for landline calls.
US local calls don't have per-minute changes. And cell phone numbering is not using a separate number sequence as in most other countries (e.g. in UK all cellphone numbers start 07x where x is 4 or above, so everyone knows when calling a cellphone).
Because of that, it'd be unreasonable to charge callers for cellphone calls, as people don't have an easy way of knowing if they're making a local landline call or calling someone on a cellphone that's potentially at the other side of the country, or abroad.
Similarly for international roaming we pay to receive in Europe too, as the caller don't know if the cellphone is abroad. Except caller pays whatever their plan would normally charge if the phone was in the country its numbering plan indicates, and the roaming charges covers the rest.
It does too in Europe, at least, when calling internationally to cell phones; the caller pays up until the border, the cell phone owner pays after that. This has led to a lot of cases of OMFG WTF when people come back home after a vacation and get their phone bill, :p.
This pay structure makes sense to me. If I'm calling someone's mobile and don't necessarily expect them to be in another country: it would be crazy to be slapped with a massive charge for that call. Makes far more sense for the receiver to make up the difference.
Which is why in EU there's a law that phone companies have to cut you off after you spend €60 in a month while roaming. You can opt out of that, but legally you have to be in that by default. It's to stop people getting screwed over massively by their phone companies when they didn't know.
Only on cell phones. Most cell phone plans include some number of free minutes per month (e.g. 450), then charge an exorbitant rate per minute after that. When you receive a call, it counts towards your free minutes or the rate.
