I thought, I should give some insight about call rates in India too here,

In India, incoming calls and messages are free (for both prepaid and postpaid) unless you receive them when you are travelling in a different state. This is called as roaming here. When you are roaming, you incur incoming charges for both calls and SMS's. These prices are fixed.

call rates generally depends on the below factors:
From what (mobile or landline) are you calling?
To what are you calling?
Is it the same network?
Local or STD or ISD?
Your chosen plan?
Also, newly pulserate!!!!

For mobile users:
calls (& SMS's) to any phone (both mobiles and landlines) in the same state are "local" calls
calls to different states: STD calls
calls to different countries: ISD calls

For landline users:
calls in same city (or area which sometimes covers surrounding places too): local
anywhere else in the country: STD
outside the country: ISD

TATA (India) & DoCoMo (Japan) have recently tied-up and introduced a 1 sec pulse rate. They charge you 1 paise for 1 sec to anywhere in the country to any phone and any network. Universal pricing!

1Re = 100 paise
Currently, $1 = 48.something Rs

Nope, see above. Said "system access fee" is just another fee the PROVIDERS tack on, while just letting you believe it is some kind of government-required extra. It used to be a DoC licensing fee, but not anymore. See HERE for details. There is another fee that they tack on for 911 access.

Yup, you just got screwed again... welcome to Canada

David...

lol. I've made sure that every time I've gotten a new plan, that I have free incoming on that plan, every single time. You'd be stupid not to.

Incoming (voice and text) is free in France too, as everywhere in Europe I guess. You even get a number of free SMS each month, to send 'Call me!' messages to others when you have no credit left :-)

Here's the Slovenian spread:

Normal tarrif: 5eur/month
Mobile internet option: 18eur/month for 20gb and it can go as low as 200mb for 6eur/month

Data only plan: 16eur/month unlimited transfer(yes real unlimited no strings attached)

Calls and SMS tend to be on the cheap side but pre-pay tend to pay more on all. All incoming calls and sms are free.

And they have some bulk deals with a ton of free minutes, some 100mb or so of data and such other combos. They alse brought out a pay as you go without a monthly fee but with everything at 0.11eur/whatever(sms,minute,MB,etc...)

Overall it's good competition with 3 cellcos for ~2mio people

I just hope the N900 will be heavily subssidiesed(as in more than 100eur) else I'll just buy it original with no strings.

Just to chime in, during my last trip to Finland seeing my relatives they were in the process of replacing their wired internet (ADSL) with a wireless (USB dongle). This was mostly because of cost, since the providers are really pushing people to abandon all wired connections... (The best way to do this is to price them accordingly.)

They don't know much about the technology, other than they just known the dongle ("mokkula"). We looked several provider options. We were even given a demo dongles over the weekend to try the connection how it works at several locations we would use it. (That is two houses, cottage, on the road, etc...) What happened is that at the location with primary use the first choice wasn't working that well. (The signal was strong but the connection was slow... likely due to too many users...) We tried the second provider (which the selling agent wasn't very willing to sell for some reason?) who had special of 12.99 Euros/month (2 year contract including free dongle) with unlimited data and unlimited speed. (The max speed supported by the network.) We tested that and got ~3Mbit/s download speed at our primary location. Certainly we were happy!

And this is not all yet... After a bit testing we found out the dongle we got first was an older model that didn't support HSDPA at 900MHz band. (On that rural area most network coverage was built with 900MHz band to get more coverage with same cell tovers.) We complained about that and oru dongle was replaced with a newer model that support the 900MHz 3G bands.

The dongles or SIMs are not locked. We tried that SIM on another Nokia 3G-phone, and it just worked fine... paired with N810 and got it working as data modem. The same worked other way round using another provider SIM card in the dongle and it worked.

Actually, during that short 2 weeks I quickly learned why the N900 has SIM slot and 3G connectivity... It is a perfect match for places like Finland.

But, bizarrely -- even at google voice rates, calling a landline is $0.02/minute while calling a cell phone is $0.14/minute. That becomes obvious, then, that the "free incoming" is built into the outgoing rate .... (which is why the US is the only place where calling a landline or cellphone is the same price?)

Nice to see US folks jealous of European folks, but it ain't that simple.

Sure Europe has better deals on connection charges, but that comes from government regulation and government regulation comes from taxes.

Would you still want these better deals if you had to pay 20% VAT on your phone?

Usually 19% VAT and at least 2 years warranty as is mandatory by EU law.

Honestly, I'd rather have a VAT over here than income tax. Heck, the way they tax us already, a 20% VAT would be a bargain compared with the 33% and higher taxes we get right now. And before anyone says, we don't get taxed that high, consider this. You pay state AND federal taxes on your income. Add them up and you'll be shocked how much you really pay. And that's *WITH* deductions. Trust me, they may list you at 20-30% tax rate, but it's way higher than that once you add everything in. The fun part is, the people who should be paying to 50% or more tax rates pay like 5% because of some very shady bookkeeping. So 20% VAT would be a bargain if they got rid of all the income taxes. Plus, all the rich jokers who keep skipping out on taxes would finally have to pay their fair share, and they wouldn't be able to hid their money anymore, since all purchases would be out in the open.