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But, as they say, all good things come to those who wait, and both Vodafone and Telecom have now announced their PTT services and pricing plans.

I hope the Commerce Commission come down like a tonne of bricks on Telecom for labelling their service as "flat rate" -- which it isn't. It's a "minimum commitment" plan, and that's a whole lot different.

For $10 a month you get up to five hours of button-time, which (at less than four cents a minute) pretty good value and makes regular call rates of almost 20 times that amount look grossly overpriced.

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Indeed, the extremely low cost of PTT services shows just how over-charged we are when it comes to regular mobile calls.

Vodafone's pricing and charging metrics are disappointingly different.

Not only do they have a much higher monthly fee, but they are using each button push as a billing counter. Given that the very nature of PTT is more suited to staccato exchanges, Vodafone users may find themselves using up their 500 pushes a whole lot faster than Telecom's customers consume their five hours.

If PTT makes voice calls seem way-expensive, just look at what they do for the price of SMS messaging.

Telecom's $10/month minimum commitment txt offer effectively becomes a very expensive alternative to PTT.

Why are customers asked to pay $10 for what amounts to some 100Kbytes of non-realtime data transfer in the form of SMS messages, when they get five hours of voice-grade data-transfer for the same price with PTT?

Something smells here!

It's interesting to note that when I bought my first cellphone back in the 1980s, the cost per voice-call minute was $0.67.

Now, almost 20 years later and despite the incredible improvements in technology and massive reductions in the cost of toll calls, internet access, etc -- the benchmark price for a mobile voice call has (in real, inflation adjusted terms) actually *increased*!

And let's not even talk about inter-network pre-pay voice calls which are around $1.50 per minute!

In the UK you can make mobile calls (including pre-paid) for as little as 3p per minute. In the USA there are many calling plans that offer rates just as low.

So why are we paying more now than we did in the 1980s?

These are questions that need to be answered.

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