WASHINGTON – Comparing wireless phone stats between countries doesn’t make sense, says international wireless organization CTIA – The Wireless Association.
The headline from Tuesday’s OECD Communications Outlook report said that Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden have the lowest prices for mobile phone calls among OECD countries, while the highest prices were found in Canada, Spain, and the United States.
But, points out CTIA, since U.S. consumers enjoy the lowest per minute rates of all of the OECD countries, what today’s the report really shows “is that some international comparisons just don’t make sense – especially when built on flawed assumptions,” reads a CTIA press release.
On page 275 of the report, even the OECD admits:
"It is important to note again that the OECD calling pattern in the basket can be significantly different than common calling profiles in a specific country. For example, the high-usage OECD basket includes 1,680 outgoing voice calls per year while users in the United States average 9,600 minutes of voice calls (combined incoming and outgoing) per year. In this case the basket provides the cost of buying exactly the calls and messages in the OECD basket rather than what may be considered a ‘typical’ bundle in the market,” reads the OECD report, if not its much-repeated-at-face-value-with-no-additional-digging (except for here) press release.
“Since the average U.S. calling profile is nearly three times greater than the OECD’s ‘high usage’ basket (and, in fact, the average U.S. calling profile is nearly six times greater than the OECD’s ‘average’ usage basket), it is no surprise that most other sources show the price per-call (or price per-MOU) in the United States is the lowest among the OECD countries,” adds CTIA.
The OECD defines a "medium use" customer as someone making 780 minutes of calls a year, and sending 600 SMS and 8 MMS messages a year (Ed note: We don’t consider ourselves an outrageously high user, but we’ve sent more than 8 MMS’s in the past two weeks).
And the report says that based on their methodology, a U.S. customer would pay $53 a month in order to get that level of service. But that assumed "medium" basket works out to about 63 minutes, 50 SMS messages, and less than one MMS message a month. That just doesn’t reflect the reality of the marketplace.
“CTIA’s semi-annual survey shows that the average wireless consumer uses around 760 minutes a month, and over 400 text messages a month,” says the association.
Plus, the CTIA survey showed that the average monthly consumer bill is US$50.07 and, since the most recent CTIA survey, a number of unlimited voice and text message plans have been introduced by U.S. wireless companies providing U.S. consumers with even greater value.
“When you look at the price American consumers actually pay for their wireless service, our per minute rates are the lowest of all the OECD countries,” concludes CTIA.
