Today I’m going completely off topic. I was fascinated by a G+ plus by John Walkenbach where he referred to this gizmodo post. This was about how people used to mail recorded message tapes to each other in order to avoid expensive long distance charges.
They used this thing to send tapes to each other…
At first I thought it was kinda quaint, but then I thought about my roaming charges for both data and voice each time I travel and realized that actually nothing much had really changed in the past 40 years.
I’m not picking on Vodafone particularly – they are all as bad as each other. But here’s their published rates for roaming in US
Sticking to voice (videos and pictures would be even worse) , say you wanted to make a 1 hour call to UK from US, here would be the very rough costs.
- Call from your cell. Cost – $130
- Record your message and send it by email or upload it somewhere
- .wav format – $1200 .. yes really…
- .mp3 format, if you can – $250
- Record your message to a memory card and send it by Fedex – $100
Maybe that mail call thing still does have a future…
The more things change, the more the remain the same
