Remember the airphones at the back of plane seats? Halfway though every cross-country flight I would use one for a few minutes to check my voice mail. At $ 4 a minute could not afford much more. On Atlantic flights I would check with a flight attendant if we were still in US airspace so as not to risk being charged even higher international rates.
In my day job, I have a keen interest in technology prices. I am paid to understand underlying costs of technology and to understand the psyche of the pricing analysts at vendors. Every time I would get on a flight I would expect to see a more reasonable price to expand the business volume of such calls. But in spite of the massive capital investment in the equipment in the planes and the ground stations, and the extremely low usage by consumers, the pricing never budged much over a decade. (There were occasional promotions - I remember where you could make an unlimited call for $ 10, and this guy from Nigeria screamed non-stop for 3 hours much to the entertainment and consternation of his fellow passengers). It was if some anal pricing analyst overrode any marketing attempts to make the product much more mainstream. In the end, though, the pricing analyst won and those phones disappeared from the airlines.
I am convinced the same analysts now are responsible for mobile roaming prices at AT&T, T-Mobile et al. Because of their insane voice prices - $ 3.49 a minute to call back from Romania to US on AT&T and data charges - Rogers charging its customers Canadian $ 76 for a 3 minute YouTube video when roaming in Europe, their poor marketers have to adopt defensive measures as T-Mobile has had to with its G1 phone.
My advice to phone companies: Retire these analysts and pay their retirement moneys in the form of airphones gathering dust somewhere.
