TruUnlimited Plans Aren’t
I really really HATE when companies that I believe know better launch an “unlimited” calling plan that has limits–not even reasonable ones at that. Today’s example are TruPhone’s new TruUnlimited plans.
I have to say, the plans are reasonable enough. For $17 USD a month, you get unlimited calls to landlines in 38 countries (includes mobiles in 9 countries). For $40, in addition to landlines in 38 countries, you get calls to mobile phones in 69 countries!
The catch with these tariffs are twofold (Edit: yes, these limits are disclosed).
- 3000 minute limit per month (which is “low” by unlimited calling standards)
- A 60 minute limit on call length
It is conceivable that a single user not sharing his account could bump up against both limits easily.
To be clear, I’m not against the limits. I understand why they are there. However, I think it is, at best, misleading to call these plans unlimited when, clearly, they have limits.
Then again, everyone else with an “unlimited” plan also has limits. Then again, doing something just because everyone else does it doesn’t make it right.
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Tags: Mobile phone, Tariff, truphone, unlimited Fnord
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Comment by spg
on first observation when i saw these plans(actually just the $40.00 one, the $17 plan is quite expensive compared to competive offerings) i thought..wow…this is revolutionary..and..how can they affird to do this. i know quite a few people who spend a ton of money calling some of these destinations(mostly the european cell phones.)
i told quite a few friends about it think they would jump..what they did instead was suggest several of us get together and pitch in on a phone and a plan and pass it around so that we each only pay a fraction of the monthly cost.
what i take from that is that the plan is propably too expensivde to attract any but the very heaviest users; and therefore truphone is likely to take a loss from many users when there expense exceed there income when users hit very close to the 3000 minutes. i basically now am part of a group of 4 people pitching in $10.00 each on one of these; if the cost was only $20.00 truphone would be very likel;y getting $80.00 from the group and still terminating the same number of minutes.
i am starting to wonder if this is all about meeting a certain ARPU goal set by the VC guys and they do not care how much it might cost them in termination costs. but however you look at it $40.00 and month is a lot of money for a long distance add on package.
as for the call length, truphones target audience for will i suspect to be largely in europe. in europe a call that last 60 minutes is considered totally obsurd; in the US(or amoung americans living abroad) its a different story.
spg
p.s. it should be call something more like the Tru3000 plan.
Comment by spg
not everyone has limits on ‘unlimited’ plans; yes all VOIP startups do. but companies like metroPCS and crickit do have real unlimited calling on their cell phones; also the unlimited long distance plans that can be bundled with POTS landline service are really unlimted.
Comment by PhoneBoy
I’ve read the fine print on some POTS “unlimited” plans and they mention a 5,000 minute limit.
Comment by spg
i found this in the quest unlimited terms:
‘Usage may be monitored and customer may be required to show compliance if usage exceeds 5,000 minutes/mo. or non-compliance indicated.’
sound to me like it is fine to go over 5000 minutes as long as it is not being used for a bussiness purposes; although i do not remeber seeing this 5000 minute quota at all last time i checked.
Comment by PhoneBoy
I haven’t read the terms in a while since I haven’t been a Qwest customer for about 2 years.
CenturyTel (my current LEC) does some peculiar things with their “unlimited.” While they don’t state a limit, using nebulous language to define fair use, they explicitly charge $0.10 a minute for long distance fax and data calls. They charge a similar rate for long distance call forwarding.
Comment by Pepe
I can guarantee you that TruPhone Unlimited isn’t… unlimited. I’ve paid them $40 on April 4th and today, April 9th, I received this SMS:
“In line with the Truphone Unlimited policy of fair, personal and non-commercial use we have had to remove you from this plan & back onto our Standard rates.”
During this period I have made 2 hours 52 minutes and 20 seconds of calls via the Truphone service, and there’s an additional call registered to my own mobile of 1h59m33s that I cannot understand how it happened.
Even if I count this last “loopback” call, I’ve used a total of 4h51m53s or about 292 minutes… and I’ve paid $40 for that, or an average of $0.13/minute. Not a good deal at all.
Now, why have I been using all this minutes in such a short period of time? Basically because I’m tech savvy and have been experiencing. Second the service had not been reliable, especially suffering from a great lag, of about 4-5s. when calling TDC Switzerland, not presenting the correct CLIP – instead one number from Hong Kong or Taiwan appeared as the call originator – and finally because I had time to experience around since I’m on holidays at home, here in Switzerland.
Now… Unlimited? To Cells and landlines?!
Nope. Not by my experience. And I’m quite unhappy, quite not satisfied with it.