Does the UK iPhone Plan Add Up? 280
An anonymous reader writes "Is it just me or is the UK iPhone deal seriously more expensive than the US deal? If you look at what AT&T offers compared to what O2 offers, you get significantly less for your money in the UK than you do in the States. It's also significantly more expensive than other non-iPhone deals in the UK, which offer similar services. Steve Jobs response to the more expensive UK iPhone is that 'it's more expensive to do business in the UK', but what does that mean? As a UK resident I'm disappointed that we didn't get the same plan as the AT&T plan, particularly the free mobile-to-mobile calls. Is there some element of the UK iPhone service that I'm missing here?"
Incoming calls are free in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, our minutes are eaten in half if we make as many calls as we receive. That's probably one aspect right there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Incoming calls are free in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Among other things, as I understand it:
European wireless customers never pay for incoming calls. Calls are charged to the caller, whether the caller is a landline or mobile. U.S. wireless customers pay for all incoming and outgoing calls (well, the calls are deducted from their monthly airtime allowance...), subject to exceptions (mobile-to-mobile on the same carrier, off-peak times)
European wireless customers only pay for outgoing SMS, not incoming. U.S. customers pay for both, with the above voice exceptions often applying to SMS.
Few European wireless carriers offer flat-rate data plans, although their pay-per-kilobyte prices are typically far cheaper than U.S. pay-per-KB prices. U.S. carriers offer exorbitant pay-per-KB prices so that anything but a minimal amount of usage proves to be more expensive than the flat-rate monthly plans. This is the big problem with the iPhone in Europe - as a few other articles have indicated, it was basically designed around an unlimited-data plan and in fact AT&T won't sell you the unit unless you get unlimited data service.
In general, Europeans jumped straight from GPRS to UMTS, skipping EDGE deployment. Bad for iPhone, no UMTS capability.
To make a long story short - comparing pricing between a U.S. carrier and a European carrier is like comparing apples to oranges. It's much easier to compare pricing schemes between U.S. carriers, which all operate on similar principles. (One exception - I get the impression European plans are a much closer match to U.S. prepaid/pay-as-you-go plans, except they are far more reasonably priced. U.S. PAYG plans are massive ripoffs.)
Re:Incoming calls are free in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And often US carriers do not provide a way to block unwanted text messages, causing me to have spent about a dollar over the life of my phone (I've had it for four years) on ten-cent text messages that someone who didn't know I don't use them sent me.
Re:Incoming calls are free in the UK (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
U.S. PAYG plans are massive ripoffs.
Depends on how you use your phone. I use mine minimally, so I have a pre-paid "plan". I spend about $6.75 per month--true I only get 27 to 52 minutes for that, but I don't use that many (and *all* my unused cash balance carries indefinitely). The phone cost me about $100, and that was two years ago. Let's say I keep it for another year, so that works out to be about $2.75 month. So for phone and service, I spend just under $10/month. That's not even close to a "massive ripoff". If you can find me a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In the case of Verizon, their PAYG plan comes out to a minimum of $30/month, and a contract plan is only $40! I think my current provider (Just started an AT&T contract) is a bit better with PAYG but not that much from what I saw.
Maybe you've found an exception...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm perplexed... I'm paying a third of what you're paying. How am I getting hosed?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well apart from Verizon of course. I heard they had a deal for 0.002 cent/MB which seems amazingly cheap. And you get fantastic customer support to back it up...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Had no problems using it at the beach (400 miles west) or the amusement park (50 miles east, next state)
Branded as Speak-out something or other. No idea whose network they use.
Both the US and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It depends on the provider, has nothing to do with (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It depends on the provider, has nothing to do w (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It depends on the provider, has nothing to do w (Score:2)
Unlimited M2M within your carrier has basically been standard in the U.S. for a few years. (Note to Europeans: ONLY applies to mobile-to-mobile on the same carrier, not to others in the U.S.)
Cruel Britannia (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
If the taxes are too high in Brittain, all you've gots to do is find some burly chaps, load them up with beer, and dump the government's tea in the harbour. Right off the ships from India!
Hah, it gets them every time! From there on, to my understading, the government pretty well folds in on itself, and you're the winner.
Like I said: It. Works. Every. Time.
(ps. If big media companies are listening, I'm available to make your new ad jingles. I. Am. Available.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've never heard of price constraints in pubs. So when you hand over that £2.80 for a pint of (chilled, cool or warm) beer of about 4.5% ABV, that's the price the pub has set itself. It's mostly tax.
Re: (Score:2)
And in true British Government fashion, they try to solve this by punishing everyone (i.e. including those who drink responsibly) by artificially increasing the price of alcohol.
It is true that this is like a form of collective punishment, but it is (so far as I am aware) the only way I've seen successfully used to change behavior. In the US they tried banning the juice outright and it was a total disaster as the black market stepped in... hey, sounds like the "war on drugs"! The key is to keep the taxes so high that people wince at the cost, but below a level where smuggling becomes worth the risk.
Actually, I take that back... many Asian countries seem to control certain problems
Re: (Score:2)
02 (Score:4, Insightful)
The Free WiFi makes the WiFi portion useful (Score:5, Informative)
Also the unlimited data usage is probably underestimated. Sure, they say 1400 pages a day, but how big is a web page these days (excluding Flash)? 100KB? That's 140MB a day, which would cost a tonne over here with many other deals.
The talk and text limits are rather poor of course. I pay £10 a month for 500 minutes and 100 texts with Three, so when £35 only has 200 minutes and 200 texts and no phone subsidy you have to worry.
Re: (Score:2)
In fact, the plan is UKP35, which means it would be UKP 28 if The Cloud's fee was excluded. 28 UKP = about $56 USD, which is actually a little less than the US iPhone plan of $59 USD.
However, the US plan has more than double the minutes and double the text messages, so you're still not getting that good a deal - but it's not as bad as it sounds at firs
Re:The Free WiFi makes the WiFi portion useful (Score:5, Informative)
£35 is £29.80 without VAT, or $60 for 200m/200t/wifi, or £23.83 / $48 for the 200m/200t only. Also because you don't lose minutes on incoming calls, that's effectively 400m/400t when comparing to the US if you get as many calls as you make. And the contract is 18 months long instead of 24.
The lifetime cost of the iPhone is £269 + £35*18 = £900. That's $1532 taking off tax and translating into US dollars. That compares reasonably very well with the lifetime cost of the iPhone in the states. And you don't need to buy a new iPod.
Apart from that the situations are so different it is pretty pointless to compare the plans.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, I didn't know VAT was applied to services - in the US, services don't get charged sales tax, only tangible goods do. So all purchases get charged VAT in the UK? That definitely makes it a pricey place to live overall.
I will note that I doubt that life in the UK is a ripoff if prices are uniformly higher than elsewhere. It sounds to me that simply mirrors the cost of doing
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously - or more seriously - that's an interesting development and we'll see how it works out for them.
Cellphone service, of course, is subject to about a million taxes already. The real difference between the US and UK is that in the UK, the taxes are included in the quoted price, while they are unloved additions to the bill in the US.
When I ran a bulletin board system years ago, I wrote a detailed explanation of my phone bill and every it
Try lowering VAT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It's simple accounting. Mind you, the UK's simple accounting is different to the US's. Everyone uses double entry here.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
W T F?
So if I start my own business that doesnt sell anything, then I can just get a refund of all my GST spent every year?
Re: (Score:2)
Most countries have things like a minimum amount of revenue and registration requirements in order to cut down on abuse. We have a similar system here in the US - I'm a contractor and do not pay income tax on any of my business expenses, be they phone bills, office equipment, etc. It's not like VAT is the devil - it's a lot simpler than income tax!
You're KIDDING. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You're KIDDING. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:You're KIDDING. (Score:5, Funny)
Rule of thumb for traveling to the UK (Score:3, Informative)
Take an item in the US, and it will probably cost the same in GBP in the UK as it does in USD in the US. With the current exchange rate, this means that most items cost a little over twice as much in the UK vis-a-vis the US.
Re:Rule of thumb for traveling to the UK (Score:4, Informative)
Rip-off Britain (Score:5, Informative)
Because they can.
British consumers have become numbed to paying more for less over the years, so companies clap their hands with glee at the thought of increasing their profit margins by 50% or more over the US for exactly the same product. "Oh, but you use PAL." "Oh, but you use 240 volts AC with three-prong plugs." "Oh, but you have VAT." Always the same excuses, and they're pretty much bullshit - but nobody questions them any more. We've been ground down by decades of being ripped off.
Mod parent up!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
However once you take tax into account then what you say is true. I don't know what US income tax rates are, and I know US goods have (~8%) sales tax applied over the sticker price unlike here, but with the UK's 22% income tax (not including first £5k earnings) plus 12% National Insurance, and then 17.5% VAT on most goods
Re: (Score:2)
$48,201 [wikipedia.org], a fair bit closer to $50k than $40k
Re:[AC]Rip-off Britain (Score:2)
Re:Rip-off Britain (Score:5, Insightful)
And because of the primary threshold on NI, they'll pay 8.8% national insurance (11% between the primary threshold and upper earnings limit).
So income tax + NI for an average earner is below 25%. Of the remaining 75%, a typical family easily spends a third on things like mortgages or rent and other things that are not subject to VAT. That leaves about 50% of their money that they pay 17.5% VAT on, or 8.75% of their income. Add it up, and the tax burden including VAT is more like ca. 34% total rounded up.
For comparison, a US average earner at $40k would pay about 19% federal income tax and social security tax (FICA) after deductions. Depending on which state they live in they'll pay anything from nothing (8 states) via 3% flat (Vermont) to around 7-8%, I believe (some states have higher max state income tax rates, but only at higher income levels). So that gives a tax range from 19% to around 26-27% plus sales taxes.
Of course these figures are not at all directly comparable to UK tax levels, since UK national insurance actually includes comprehensive health insurance and partial dental, to the point where only a tiny fraction of British taxpayers see any value in private health insurance.
But in any case, when you add up local taxes (in which case you need to take into account council tax in the UK too, though certain cities in the US have local taxes that can far outstrip the UK council tax), state taxes and federal taxes in the US, the UK and US have pretty similar tax levels even ignoring the fact that NI includes health insurance.
I did the math for myself a couple of years ago, and realized that moving to the US (which was an option due to work) would not have saved me any tax at all unless I moved to some backwater I wouldn't be prepared to live in - in fact I might have ended up paying slightly more, and I would have ended up paying a lot more if I wasn't in a field where full health insurance typically is provided as a benefit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you hate getting ripped off in Britain and think things are much better in the US, well then move to the US.
You can earn a lot more and buy a lot more electronic gadgets.
How do I know all this? Well, because that's what I did, ten years ago.
Is it all quite that simple? Well, no, but this IS slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
"laws" (Score:2, Insightful)
The Sale of Goods Act 1979 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm American but have lived in London for ten years. Yes, (some) things are more expensive here. I was curious and looked into it. Excepted from the above link:
When you buy goods from a trader, such as a shop, market stall, garage, etc, you enter into a contract, which is controlled by many laws including, the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended by the Sale & Supply of Goods Act 1994 and the Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002). The law gives you certain implied, or automatic, statutory rights, under this contract.
The Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) says that goods should be :
Store policies don't matter; this is the law and retailers must incorporate this cost into selling prices.
Uniform Commercial Code does all of that too. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A consumer's statutory rights may not be excluded or modified in the UK. A retailer can only grant additional protection to the consumer, NEVER remove a statutory right
US retailers can put up a sign saying: "no returns on sale items." In the UK this is utterly unenforceable. US retailers, as a matter of course, print post-partum conditions of sale on the receipt that they hand you after you have paid for th good
Re: (Score:2)
If you buy goods that turn out to be faulty, the seller is in breach of contract, you are entitled to the usual remedies, either they fix the problem quickly (replace, repair or refund..), or you fix the situation yourself and require that they foot the bill (go buy a new one, ship broke one back to them, ask them for the difference).
These apply to new goods AND used goods,
Re: (Score:2)
I kind of like the UK's rules better for buying goods at a store, but I'd hate to be seller on eBay or their equivalent of craigslist.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Those requirements only apply to sales by traders. Items sold by private individuals only have to be 'as described'.
A particularly active eBay seller might be considered a trader, but people trying to get rid of their old stuff don't need to worry.
Re: (Score:2)
Things in UK cost more because people aren't so price-conscious as our American cousins. It's not as socially acceptable to talk about money as it is in the US. Same thing effects wages - it's a taboo to discuss what you earn for us Brits (and is often actively discouraged by employers).
The answer (Score:5, Informative)
It's not called Rip Off Britain [rip-off.co.uk] for nothing you know.
Seriously though, yes our prices include VAT at 17.5% which people often forget to take into account but, even so, there are plenty of products which have such a colossal additional mark-up on them (Windows Vista is twice as expensive which tax and shipping costs cannot explain away) compared to our European and American counterparts that it is hard not to feel cheated.
The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on it is worth reading and notes that these items cost significantly more in the UK:
Unfortunately as we put up with paying those prices, we allow companies to continually screw us.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Software (Score:3, Funny)
Note that Adobe and Autodesk also have vast price increases up to well over 2x as expensive; not including the 17.5% / 19% VAT that gets added on top. With the sucking U.S. dollar, that's only getting worse and worse. It'll be interesting to see if Adobe / Autodesk / etc. will adjust their non-U.S. pricing to adjust for this, as currently it is much cheaper to import from the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What translation? It's not like they offer Windows in Welsh or Gaelic.* Microsoft cares so little about Britain that they can't even be bothered to take five minutes to change "color" to "colour". No, I don't think they can claim translation costs are what's pushing the price up.
* Yes, I know a Welsh interface pack does finally exist now, and a Gaelic equivalent is apparently
Ahem... (Score:2)
This article does not cite any references or sources.
Shock, horror - some things are more expensive in some locales and cheaper in others. If you don't like it, put down the Daily Mail, stop whinging, and move.
There are significant differences in prices and wages across the UK (and of course across the US and other countries as well). There are no inverse price restrictions ensuring that "iTunes Store songs" (there's a staple, obviously...
Re: (Score:2)
O2, not Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Only its not. Its getting you "unlimited" data, which you'll use up if you view 1400 webpages in a day, according to the announcements at launch. Who knows how many "webpages" constantly polling for mail in background is going to use, but judging by the $25,000 bills that some US users have ended up with after roaming, its probably quite a few.
English Prices (Score:2)
BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple [roughlydrafted.com]
The BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some o
Re: (Score:3)
But the iPhone doesn't innovate. It's actually an extremely limited handset that uses outdated connection formats at a time when people want 3G, picture messaging, video messaging and downloadable content. The nokia N95 does much more than the iphone and is several hundreds of pounds cheaper.
"Apple takes 40% of O2's revenues!!!"
The iPh
It's really simple (Score:2)
not comparable (Score:5, Interesting)
There is nothing special about a Mac or iPhone or iPod. The Mac provides me a great deal of value, so I buy it. The iPhone does not provide the value that the additional costs would warrant, so I won't buy one. I think people miss this simple point when they complain about the price drop of the iPhone. Current users effectively spent $2000 for the phone. This amount of money meant that the phone must have had some significant value to them, especially those that bought the first week. The $200 discount then represents a mere 10% discount, and 10% is an exceptional price to become an early adopter. I was not an early adopter my normal tolarance for contracted costs is about a third of what Apple and ATT wanted.
I hope we don't have to endure another year of moaning about the cost of the phone, or the cost of the plan, or the cost of early adoption. Those who have it find some value in it, and that is really all there is to it. Apple sells expensive machines, and those that need or want them buy them. Those that do not don't. If one needs or wants an iPhone, the costs will be worth it. Otherwise buy something else and apple will out the costs until it is low enough to attract the expected number of consumers.
The EC will love the iPhone (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, if it actually does become a large success the EC will want to have something to say about the relationship between the iPhone, iTunes and the iPod, and also the deal with O2. If they actually decide to do something about it then a bunch of people who can barely find Europe on the map, let alone know anything about its legal history, will moan and accuse the EU of being partial against US companies, and as a result get flamed on slashdot [for great justice]. Politics at its finest...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)
Lucky Brits! Stop complaining... (Score:2)
4 albums at iTunes Store unfair usage? (Score:2)
I can't see O2 being able to enforce such a ridiculous limit, it clearly falls foul of the UK's law that states unfair contract terms cannot be enforced.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:My UK Phone Deal is free - How does that compar (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, 40k for a project manager (assuming a project manager in the real sense of the word, not just a speudo-manager-wannabee) is a ripoff, no matter where you live, so its quite the poor example. When I was your age I was being paid a -lot- more than 40k, for jobs that generally pay a -lot- less than project managers, and my "education" was nothin
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Lets not forget the increase in living expenses such as food costs, cds, electronics and such that not only cost more in the UK but cost significantly more in London. This is why there is the "London Allowance
Re: (Score:2)
See here [wikipedia.org] for UK income tax rates. (10% divident, 20% savings, 22% "other income").
One thing that Uk residents definitely get get stuffed on is VAT (Value added tax) which is 17.5% on pretty much everything.
Compare prices of cigarettes for example, US: $6.50, UK:£6. It's expensive to kill yourself in England.
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, having lived in both the US and the UK, I don't see much difference. In both countries, there are cameras at airports, in shops, in gambling halls, on street-corners (looking at traffic), in banks etc. For all the rap the UK gets about this "network of cameras", 99% of them are exactly the same cameras as the US (anf many other countries) have.
Simon.