After years of decreasing prices, this month marked a turning point for the Pakistan mobile industry. Virtually all the big players have increased prices, by slapping on a 5% service charge on pre-paid celluar connections. Here is the notice from Mobilink’s website:
Dear Jazz Customer, from now onwards 5% service charges (on recharge face value) will be applicable on all recharges via Jazz Load or scratch card.
It’s hard to advertise a price increase, so the companies have chosen a very sneaky way of increasing prices - this way the advertised call rates will remain unchanged, but the actual price goes up nonetheless! This technique can also be used to lower advertised call rates - by increasing this “service charge” and adding other charges as well.
With the economy failing along with everything else as well, I think we’ve probably going not going to see lower cell phone prices for some time now.
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