Considering an upgrade to the iPhone

Over the last few months, my cell phone bill has skyrocketed, nearly doubled because friends have started sending me photos from their cell phones and I don't have a data plan. What would have been a 4,200 yen monthly bill has jumped to close to 9,000 yen (over $100!). This is clearly unacceptable and I have started looking into getting a data plan for my cell phone.

On an interesting note, data packets for cell phones are a major ripoff. My carrier, charges 0.2 yen / 128 bytes (1 packet), this pretty much equates to 1638.4 yen for 1 MB (1024^2 for 1 MB), or about $20 for 1 MB on the go. This is astronomically expensive!

Considering that a 400x320 jpeg is about 100 kb, I am paying about $2 for an image being sent to me. Compare that to a $1 song on iTunes. Wireless carriers are making pretty big margins on their data rates. I do have to wonder how much regulation is keeping new people with fresh ideas out from bringing these costs down.

I have considered adding an unlimited data plan to my cell phone, though it would be a nice feature, I would be missing out on the full richness of having the internet available to me on my mobile device because of its limited user interface. While being back home, I had the opportunity to use the iPhone for an entire week, just using the instant messaging and accessing e-mail here and there has me very enthusiastic about the device and I am seriously considering making the switch.

The new 32 GB iPhone 4 would cost me about $700 and a 16 GB version would run me about $600, I've been looking at the one Japanese iPhone carrier softbank and noted that with a data plan alone, I would be spending about 3785 yen/month for an unlimited data plan and I would be billed per 30 sec for phone calls unless I added a voice plan to make calling "cheaper" --> obviously, the name of the game for softbank is to push the iPhone and it's internet abilities and then quietly sneak in a voice plan.

Now that I understand the name of the game here, if I were to use an iPhone, my goal would be simple-- find a way around using the ordinary voice plan for making calls, because it is really expensive. Without a plan, they charge 41 yen/minute and if you pay an additional 980 yen/month the voice charge is 21 yen/min (using something called a "white plan"). The question is, "can I do better?" and the answer is, (unsurprisingly) yes.

Enter Skype

The ironic thing is that I was looking to get an iPhone to lower my data transfer costs but in actuality I can reduce my voice calling costs significantly by purchasing a skype number for Japan. Buying a skype number with a monthly subscription is 200 yen/month and I am looking at a 400 min subscription for about 500 yen/month. The savings are very significant after the number crunching as shown in the table below.

What it means is that for the price of a new iPhone I can reduce my monthly calling costs (and have 2x more minutes) and have an unlimited data plan for the same price as my old plan on my old provider.

I don't know about you, but barring quality of service problems, this looks like a winning plan to me.