Unused 'free' minutes cost Brits £800m a year
Aren't we a lazy lot...
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My wife never uses up her mobile minutes. I know we can save £5 a month if she swaps to a cheaper contract - but have we done it? Of course not.
In common with 55 per cent of mobile phone users on monthly contracts who never use up their free minutes, we are paying too much.
The average too much is £62 a year. Add all those too muches and you get the untidy sum of £800m - divvied up by the cellos, because we are too lazy or too confused to swap tariffs.
These is the finding of a survey of 2,002 UK adults aged 18+, conducted by Opinium on behalf of the British price comparison site Top10.com.
So before you tie yourself into a two year contract for that fancy smartphone, check out your phone bills and make sure you don't over-pad your minutes.
Top10's research also reveals that 1.3m (8 per cent of people on monthly contracts) have to top up each month, typically by £10 a time, because they exceed their free minutes.
COMMENTS
@Jerome 0
Come on mate, splill the beans, who, where, when and how much. Email if posting onhre is not allowed. Ta
What about texts?
Given the rather large number of tarrifs out there that come with thousands of included texts, I reckon there are more wasted texts than the the number of atoms in the known universe, or a googolplex at least.
Re: Yeah right
Not sure what you're getting at here. The whole point of the article, for those of you napping at the back, is that this is how phone companies make their money these days: they get you to pay for something you'll never use. In short, they've almost become like financial services businesses, although not quite as much as utility companies who advertise "market prices" for electricity which don't give them any incentive to keep the prices down, but which do make the punters feel like they're getting "value for money".
I don't know where you're living, but where I am, the x minutes for free "offers" work out at a price per minute that they actually charge you after you exceed the limit. In other words, they're almost blatantly getting you to commit to (not) using up the x minutes. And if you do happen to go over, there's probably no big penalty for them. They've just got you to commit to giving them a fat, reliable revenue stream, and there's no guarantee that you'll ever come and collect the goods.
So, erm, yeah right. You'll never use all those minutes - that's the whole point. I bet if everyone tried, the network would just be largely unavailable, and they'd wave you away if you complained. Meanwhile, they're getting a tidy sum every month for doing nothing more than requesting a bit of bandwidth, at least in most cases.
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