Real Cost

Anything that you pay for has an advertised cost and a real cost. The real cost is often invisible due to marketing plans, or the difficulty of seeing cost versus usage. In this post I would like to discuss one of the real costs in my life and how they compare to the advertised cost.

Everyone has a cell phone these days. There are thousands of phones and an even greater array of calling and data plans. I am a very basic user when it comes to wireless services. I do not text, and I do not surf. Thus I need only calling minutes. The plan we decided to go with is a pay as you go $.075 per minute. This seems pretty good: 300 minutes for $20. When I began to investigate our actual usage and what we were being charged for I found that a majority of our calls were far short of a whole minute. We were however being charged in rounded up full minutes even for calls that ended exactly on a whole minute. See the data below.



In the first chart you can see that every call that was made resulted in an overcharge for minutes. This resulted in the real rate per minute being slightly higher than the advertised rate on average. On very short calls the real rate was extremely high.

The real cost of our cell phone service comes out as $.088 per minute (20% more than the advertised price)

Unfortunately unless you live in Peru (one of the only places I can find that charges by the second for airtime) you are stuck with the roundup policy. The only real result of this analysis for me is a new tendency to not call anyone if I am not sure of getting through. Also if I think the conversation will take less than one minute I send an e-mail instead. Overall I am now using fewer minutes, and spending less