“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.

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.

‘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.

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.