Excited at the voice price plan consolidation

Julia posted a point today about Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile (and, actually, Sprint and Helio) all beginning to offer unlimited voice calls for a fixed monthly fee. Call it $100 a month — or thereabouts.

I’ve been waiting for this sort of reality-check consolidation for quite a while. For years, actually. I’ve been getting wound up no end by ‘greedy’ mobile operators charging silly amounts of money for voice calls. Whenever I describe an operator as ‘greedy’, I get an avalanche of emails (and a few comment replies) citing factors like ‘having to pay to keep the lights on’ and so on.

I’m not advocating free unlimited calls. Not at all. But I think $100 a month — or £50 pounds a month is a reasonable fee to pay per month for unlimited voice calls form your mobile phone.

I have little time at all for Vodafone UK’s 40 pence per minute out-of-plan charges to call another UK landline. It’s these sort of stupid, stupid price points that wind up consumers continually. But good on Vodafone for continuing to stick to its pricing guns. If customers are stupid enough to pay…

We’ve had unlimited price creep in the UK for some time. For example on T-Mobile UK’s Flext price plan, you can generally get a variety of unlimited landline calls thrown in (sometimes off-peak). But we’ve not good sensible unlimited offerings as yet because there’s substantial pain — perceived or real (depending on your viewpoint) — in offering ‘unlimited’ cross network minutes here in the UK. Big pain. Still.

Verizon’s offering — $99 — includes all voice calls, local, national, landline or mobile. They just don’t mind. Pile it high, sell it (resonably) cheap. The US mantra. Commit to paying them at leat $99, together with data, email and other up-sell services and you’re boosting ARPU to $150 per month. I like it.

I like it for the operator, I like it for the consumer. It’s going to be quite a while before we see anything like this in the UK, right?

You never know, 3UK might surprise us all..