On Sat, 20 Jul 2019 14:35:54 +0100, MissRiaElaine
wrote:

On 20/07/2019 14:19, Clank wrote:
MissRiaElaine Wrote in message:
Now that *is* semantics. In all but name, it's a contract. Or equivalent to one, which amounts to the same thing.
As far as I'm concerned, PAYG is just that. Paying per month is not paying as you go, it's paying regularly, which is to me a contract.

Well, it might be to you, but it isn't to anyone else. Redefining
the meaning of words may make you think you're winning an
argument in your own head, but you really ain't.

If you are "paying as you go", in advance, and with no outstanding
commitment whatsoever should you choose to stop paying at any
time, then you do not have a contract. You just have a regular
spending habit.

As I said, semantics. I won't argue with you any more, you're entitled
to your view, but please allow me to have mine.

Anything involving someone agreeing to supply goods or services in
return for you supplying some kind of consideration (usually money) is
a "contract". It is just easier for their lazy advertising/publicity
wonks to claim there is no contract rather than get into a more
involved description of a contract which tends to die at the end of
(usually) a month's service. At worst it leads to disputes where the
seller claims there is no contract when there still is.

Clank wrote:
MissRiaElaine Wrote in message:
You can have one-month rolling contracts, say £10 a month.
Some operators may call it PAYG but it's still a contract as far as I'm
concerned and I wouldn't touch one with a very long pole.

The difference between 30-day contract, and pay as you go, is very
simple - with PAYG you pay in advance, with the contract you pay
in arrears. (For the calls at least, if not the standing charge
- although these days most calls are covered by the standing
charge anyway so it does become slightly harder to discern the
difference.)


Contract takes its monthly payment automatically until you tell them
otherwise, PAYG requires you to specifically make the payment, surely?
(I’ve never had a payg phone so I can’t be sure)


Anna Noyd-Dryver

In message , at 19:09:38 on Sat, 20 Jul
2019, Anna Noyd-Dryver remarked:
You can have one-month rolling contracts, say £10 a month.
Some operators may call it PAYG but it's still a contract as far as I'm
concerned and I wouldn't touch one with a very long pole.

The difference between 30-day contract, and pay as you go, is very
simple - with PAYG you pay in advance, with the contract you pay
in arrears. (For the calls at least, if not the standing charge
- although these days most calls are covered by the standing
charge anyway so it does become slightly harder to discern the
difference.)

Contract takes its monthly payment automatically until you tell them
otherwise, PAYG requires you to specifically make the payment, surely?
(I’ve never had a payg phone so I can’t be sure)

Apart, of course, from auto-topup PAYG schemes. But I don't count those
as separate class of subscription, any more than an auto-topup Oyster is
a season ticket.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 20:25:14 on Sat, 20 Jul
2019, Clank remarked:
Roland Perry Wrote in message:

There is no "contract" in the mobile phone sense.

I admit it's a long time since I studied contract law, but I don't
remember "a mobile phone sense" being one of the criteria the law
uses to determine if a contract exists. They were all boring
things like offer, acceptance, intent to deal and other such
boring stuff.

A contract either is or it isn't. I have two SIMs in my phone
right now - one is PAYG, one is a contract. The latter is an
automatically renewing 30-day contract, but that doesn't make it
any less of a contract.

What we are actually trying to do is find non-confusing names for
post-pay PAYG subscriptions.

Even a pre-pay PAYG is a contract (in the legal sense) because you pay
them (say) £10 and they are contractually bound to provide you with
certain telecoms services (be that until the balance expires at the end
of the month, or until it's all used up, or whatever the T&C say)

To complicate things further, the first mobile contract I had was
paid monthly in advance for the "rental and bundle" with "out of
bundle" calls paid monthly in arrears.

That is literally exactly what I said.

You introduced yet another bit of non-standard terminology: "standing
charge".
--
Roland Perry

On Sat, 20 Jul 2019 19:09:38 -0000 (UTC)
Anna Noyd-Dryver wrote:
Clank wrote:
MissRiaElaine Wrote in message:
You can have one-month rolling contracts, say £10 a month.
Some operators may call it PAYG but it's still a contract as far as I'm
concerned and I wouldn't touch one with a very long pole.

The difference between 30-day contract, and pay as you go, is very
simple - with PAYG you pay in advance, with the contract you pay
in arrears. (For the calls at least, if not the standing charge
- although these days most calls are covered by the standing
charge anyway so it does become slightly harder to discern the
difference.)


Contract takes its monthly payment automatically until you tell them
otherwise, PAYG requires you to specifically make the payment, surely?
(I’ve never had a payg phone so I can’t be sure)

I think there's some confusion between a phone contract with a legal contract.
PAYG is not a phone contract but is a legal contract for the phone company to
provide you with a service while you still have money on account.

Roland Perry Wrote in message:
A contract either is or it isn't. I have two SIMs in my phone
right now - one is PAYG, one is a contract. The latter is an
automatically renewing 30-day contract, but that doesn't make it
any less of a contract.
What we are actually trying to do is find non-confusing names for post-pay PAYG subscriptions.

But there already is an industry standard (since you love that so
much) name for them: "SIM Only Contract". Which typically come
in varieties such as "30 Day SIM-Only Contract", "12 Month
SIM-Only Contract", etc. (Albeit in this case there is little
value to the longer-than-30day variants.)

Even a pre-pay PAYG is a contract (in the legal sense) because you pay them (say) £10 and they are contractually
bound to provide you with certain telecoms services (be that until the balance expires at the end of the month,
or until it's all used up, or whatever the T&C say)

Actually, that's debatable. It may be that the contract of sale
is exhausted at the moment they credit your account... If the
credits you bought then weren't fit for purpose (because they
stopped accepting then for making calls) or if they just
disappeared with them, other consumer law may apply... But that's
a diversion.

That is literally exactly what I said.
You introduced yet another bit of non-standard terminology: "standing charge"

So non-standard you didn't understand what it meant?

(Actually I'm fairly sure that's what we called it 25 years ago
when I developed a telco's billing system - but if I'm honest
I've mostly tried to block that from my memory. Processing CDRs
to try and calculate whatever the latest impenetrable discount
scheme they've come up with can do bad things to a
man.)

--

In message , at 15:27:02 on Sat, 20 Jul
2019, remarked:
Ok Mr Telecoms Expert, exactly how much disk space does all the relevant
information about a single cellular phone number take up then? Obviously you
have the figures to hand so please share them.

I can't explain something like this when you have completely the wrong
architectural and business model as an underlying assumption.

Go on, live dangerously, give it a go. How much data does it take up? Or are
you going to claim that telecoms companies use dilithium quantum computers
that store information in hyperspace rather than standard databases or hash
maps?

Unless the system is completely insane there should be no relation. Perhaps
you're going to tell us next that radio stations transmitter charges are
based on the number of listeners they have?

A Freeview-type transmitter might well charge based on the number of
stations you wish to transmit (eg CH4 and Ch4+1, costing more than just
Ch4).

Yes, congratulations - because each station takes up bandwidth. How much
bandwidth does an unused phone number use?

Apart from that, your ability to fail to distinguish between
broadcasting and telecoms speaks volumes.

Your refusal to acknowledge an obvious analogy speaks volumes that you've
been painted into a corner.

Let us know when you get to Australia.
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 13:51:14 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:27:02 on Sat, 20 Jul
2019, remarked:
Ok Mr Telecoms Expert, exactly how much disk space does all the relevant
information about a single cellular phone number take up then? Obviously you

have the figures to hand so please share them.

I can't explain something like this when you have completely the wrong
architectural and business model as an underlying assumption.

Go on, live dangerously, give it a go. How much data does it take up? Or are
you going to claim that telecoms companies use dilithium quantum computers
that store information in hyperspace rather than standard databases or hash
maps?

Unless the system is completely insane there should be no relation. Perhaps
you're going to tell us next that radio stations transmitter charges are
based on the number of listeners they have?

A Freeview-type transmitter might well charge based on the number of
stations you wish to transmit (eg CH4 and Ch4+1, costing more than just
Ch4).

Yes, congratulations - because each station takes up bandwidth. How much
bandwidth does an unused phone number use?

Apart from that, your ability to fail to distinguish between
broadcasting and telecoms speaks volumes.

Your refusal to acknowledge an obvious analogy speaks volumes that you've
been painted into a corner.

Let us know when you get to Australia.

I'll take that as a no, you can't back up anything you said. As I suspected.

On 20/07/2019 12:06, wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jul 2019 06:54:13 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:43:43 on Thu, 18 Jul
2019, remarked:
Ones where the credit rolls over and you don't have to make a regular
calls to keep them alive, aren't quite as common as you claim. The
networks hate them because they tend to get used in "glovebox" phones
were they have all the costs of maintaining the number and the billing
records, for virtually no revenue.

Oh come on, its costs them precisely £0.00 to maintain a number, its simply

data in a database.

Ah, the marginal costs fallacy rears its ugly head.

The only cost involved in an unused number is the cost to the user when the
phone company disconnects the SIM. The rest of it costs nothing because the
infrastructure would be needed regardless and linking a phone number to a
SIM id is probably a few hundred bytes or less in a DB. You could store the
entire UK phone book and every cellphone IMEI number on a USB stick with room
to
spare never mind a fully fledged datacentre.

Let me know when you need a new spade, if that one wears out.

Ok Mr Telecoms Expert, exactly how much disk space does all the relevant
information about a single cellular phone number take up then? Obviously you
have the figures to hand so please share them.

Nah - whilst I do know the exact figure (or more to the point I could
look it up), it's getting more and more amusing to see you getting
irate when you seem to truly believe that the only cost is the disk
space - something that if it makes up 0.01% of the cost would surprise me.

On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 19:55:40 +0100
Someone Somewhere wrote:
On 20/07/2019 12:06, wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jul 2019 06:54:13 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:43:43 on Thu, 18 Jul
2019, remarked:
Ones where the credit rolls over and you don't have to make a regular
calls to keep them alive, aren't quite as common as you claim. The
networks hate them because they tend to get used in "glovebox" phones
were they have all the costs of maintaining the number and the billing
records, for virtually no revenue.

Oh come on, its costs them precisely £0.00 to maintain a number, its
simply

data in a database.

Ah, the marginal costs fallacy rears its ugly head.

The only cost involved in an unused number is the cost to the user when the

phone company disconnects the SIM. The rest of it costs nothing because the

infrastructure would be needed regardless and linking a phone number to a
SIM id is probably a few hundred bytes or less in a DB. You could store the

entire UK phone book and every cellphone IMEI number on a USB stick with
room
to
spare never mind a fully fledged datacentre.

Let me know when you need a new spade, if that one wears out.

Ok Mr Telecoms Expert, exactly how much disk space does all the relevant
information about a single cellular phone number take up then? Obviously you
have the figures to hand so please share them.

Nah - whilst I do know the exact figure (or more to the point I could
look it up), it's getting more and more amusing to see you getting
irate when you seem to truly believe that the only cost is the disk
space - something that if it makes up 0.01% of the cost would surprise me.

If the number belongs to a real network not a virtual one, what are the
other costs then? Unless its used up its entire allocation of numbers it
won't be losing any money so tell me what I've missed. You and Perry are very
good at being supercilious, a bit less hot on supplying actual information.