What a difference an ocean makes

The Cranky Economist held off on getting a cell phone for several years, while all around me my peers were starting to chat away on the then-not-quite-as-ubiquitous-as-today devices. That all changed when I got to London a couple years ago. Not only were "mobiles" (as the Europeans snootily call them) even more common than in the States, but my landline wasn't working for my first three weeks in my new home. Enough was enough, and off I trotted to obtain a little blue Siemens phone and an Orange pay-as-you-go service plan.

What struck me at the time was the "inconvenience" of the plans on offer. Although I had not yet joined in the Stateside cellular revolution, I had seen a year's worth of TV ads from competing American service providers offering enormous new-service bonuses, free evenings and weekends, and extra minutes up one shining sea and down the other. Not so in England. If you sign up for a regular monthly plan, you get however many minutes you pay for and not a minute more, even if you're phoning home on a Sunday. There are extra fees for calling people who are not members of the same network you are. And these plans are uniformly more expensive than the American equivalents that offer the Yankee bells and whistles. Not to mention that, at least two years ago, they were all completely the same, at a time when American providers were bending over backwards to offer features (like Cingular's famous "roll-over") that would differentiate them from the competition.

In short, for a variety of reasons that the Cranky Economist only incompletely comprehends, British wireless operators have had enormous latitude to create their dream marketplace -- competitive, yes, but also very definitely price-setting. Now, however, they might be starting to wonder whether that's all about to change as no-frills competitors join the playing field (free site registration required).

Being a Cranky Economist and not a Cranky Telecoms Analyst, I have no idea how the entry of no-frills providers will or won't shake up the British mobile market. But that won't stop me from looking with some puzzlement at an odd marketplace -- where the customer base is saturated and prices are high, and yet no one is willing to embark on some American-style price-cutting.