Warning: Heavy SMS text messagers avoid Far EasTone!

Life Technology
21

I have had a KGT mobile for 3 years on the normal monthly billed basis. At the time I went to them they were the only ones who would give an phone to a foreigner on a monthly contract without a guarantor. The policy, as it was explained to me then, is that you needed to have a job and an ARC with more than six months left to run. Ironically, KGT were later taken over by FarEastTone which, at that time anyway, had the reputation of being the least foreigner-friendly.

I have also had PHS for a few years and because I get my internet from APBB (Cable Modem) I was offered a CDMA contract. The biggest problem for me with PHS and APTelecom is that they can neither recieve nor send text messages internationally nor roam in other than in a very few countries. (I have to say that I find the software on the two PHS phones I have had counterintuitive and poor. That’s the main thing that stops me using PHS more.)

Since I came to Taiwan four years ago I have never had a guarantor for anything (including phone lines, credit cards and mobile phones). But it does mean that you usually have to go with whichever company will do business with you.

I have the sense that when you apply for stuff it can also help sometimes if you first offer your TW driving licence (and maybe Health Insurance Card) as ID. Because then you are presenting the person processing with something they easily recognise and will usually accept from TW customers in place of the National Identity Card.

22

Far Eastern costs 3NT/SMS and I was told it’s about the same for the other companies. Is it?

23

Thanks for the write-up coolingtower. FITEL’s web prescence is another triumph of style over content. I found the G1000 down to about NT$8000, and there’s a service center 200m from my house, so I’ll go check them out. I would keep my GSM service up as I spend a lot of my time racing around at over 100kmh, and in the mountains.

24

Nope. Chunghwa used to charge me just over NT$1.

Coolingtower - I haven’t really got time at the moment to do anything, but I am curious.

Dreamer - Yeah, it’s a matter of luck, and you’ve been lucky. Years ago before all this anti-foreigner shit it was all just a matter of whether you could afford what you wanted to get.

25

dreamer said:

Do you realize that Asia Pacific is also called “Qma” and that system is CDMA??? This has nothing to do with PHS. If you have a 0982 Qma phone, you can go to Korea and use it. If you have a PHS 0968 phone, you can go to Japan and use it. GSM, PHS, and CDMA are all equally different at the consumer level–technologically they are very different.

dreamer said:

[quote]Since I came to Taiwan four years ago I have never had a guarantor for anything (including phone lines, credit cards and mobile phones). But it does mean that you usually have to go with whichever company will do business with you.

I have the sense that when you apply for stuff it can also help sometimes if you first offer your TW driving licence (and maybe Health Insurance Card) as ID. Because then you are presenting the person processing with something they easily recognise and will usually accept from TW customers in place of the National Identity Card.[/quote]

When I hear this, I am like the guy hanging on the wall in the prison cell in Monty Python’s Life of Brian saying: “You lucky bastard. You lucky, lucky bastard”

At Asia Pacific, I gave them my Taiwan Area Residence Card (TARC, which few people have), ROC passport, Health Insurance Card (which no longer says “Wai Ji”, or “foreigner” below my picture, and let them copy my document of “Naturalization of Republic of China Citizenship”. They still refused.

You got a credit card, too??? All I can say is: YOU LUCKY BASTARD!!! (You know I’m referencing a movie here and no negative karma is implied) :laughing:

26

:astonished: :astonished: :fume: :fume:

27

Yup, I’ve been lucky. But I’ve also been turned down four times more often than I’ve been accepted for anything here. Persistence and luck in equal measure, I’d say.

I had four credit cards, now three. One was cancelled simply because my company told the bank I was no longer working with them. :fume:

It relates to credit cards more than phones, but I’ve found that you can sometimes get over an initial refusal for a co-branded card by getting the co-brand partner to intervene. In my case I got a China Airlines - ABN Amro Bank Visa Card by asking China Airlines if it was a good idea to exclude their foreign customers (who must surely be more profitable than average) from one of their main customer loyalty schemes.

Yes, I know CDMA and PHS systems are different. But neither is much use in Europe, where I am from. Incidentally, I got my PHS about 14 months ago. I’d be more than happy to go to a PHS shop with anyone who wants and ‘introduce’ them IF you think it would make a difference to have an existing customer with the same ‘qualifications’ right in front of their noses.

28

Hexuan,

I just got off the phone with Da Zhong Telecom (FITEL–the PHS company). I had some questions about the convoluted paper they gave me.

Here’s how it goes:
With “no monthly charge”, it’s 1.9 dollars a minute, or 0.04 dollars a second calling a PHS phone.
If you call “in the middle of the night”, which they deem 1am to 5am, it’s 0.55 and 0.01, respectively.

Calling a non-PHS phone, it’s 3.9 dollars a minute or 0.09 dollars a second. Calling an in-Taiwan (or PSTN) number is the same.

The 98 dollar monthly fee plan is 1.9 dollars for 3 minutes. This is good if you make a lot of calls.

For 299 a month, you can get a free phone. Same charges, though.

If you call a lot of local numbers, they have a $199 plan where local calls are 2.9 dollars a minute//0.06 a second instead of the usual 3.9/0.08.

Messages? The same: 2.5 dollars for sending a message to a non-PHS system, and 1.5 dollars for sending a message to a PHS phone.

Email: It’s 0.04 dollars per second to send email. This is way cheaper than sending a message that is split into 3 or 4 SMS messages.

I don’t know if you’ll be at the forumosa event tonight, but I’ll bring the info just in case. I’ll be wearing brown-colored Dr. Martens boots and a leather jacket.

29

You meet people like this sometimes. They just don’t want to deal with people they perceive to be “foreigners” and there’s no talking to them.

30

Has anyone compared the rates, within and across network, for both texting and calls for the major service providers? My GF and I and her folks are on three diff. nets, and our phone bills last month were $3k each, which we’d like to cut as much as possible. I would expect a chart to be available in some consumer periodical or online, but haven’t been able to find anything.

I did find a summary of the contact info for all the providers, at dgt.gov.tw/English/Data-stat … hone.shtml

Maybe I’ll just have to call them and/or check websites one by one.

31

Yeah Db, missus and I went through the futile exercise a few months ago. We lucked out and took advantage of a PHS promo where if you can prove that you spent more than NT$1000 on mobile calls AND had a company sponsor your mobile phone, they’d give you the Sanyo G1000 phone for free at $499 a month. 1 year contract.

The Sanyo G1000 is a good enough phone. Battery life is barely 24 hours on the PHS+GSM mode though. The other downside is there is absolutely no English manual for it.

BTW, miltownkid found out that PHS phones are available to foreigners without all that usual foreigner bogosity. PM him for more details about it. Otherwise, Loretta’s Taiwancell.net would be a viable option.

32

I second Yellow Cartman’s excellent advice. TaiwanCell.net

It’s cheaper than any of the pay-as-you-go services, although you may be able to get better deals from the big companies if you can get them to talk to you. TaiwanCell doesn’t require an ARC, contracts are open-ended with a three-month minimum, deposits are fully refundable. Text messages cost NT$3 at the moment, but I’m trying to get that reduced.

Thanks for the plug, mate.

33

On the TaiwanCell webpage, it says

[quote]Check out these rates!!*
What do our competitors charge?
NT$5/minute - minimum spend NT$2000/month (= 400 minutes!)
NT$6/minute - minimum NT$1200/month (= 200 minutes!)
NT$6.5/minute - minimum NT$975/month (= 150 minutes!)
NT$7/minute - minimum NT$840/month (= 120 minutes!)
NT$3/text message[/quote]

First, some feedback to Loretta: This is confusing, because the first line appears to introduce the prices below it, but so does the second line. In other words, it’s confusing as to whether it is this service’s or the competitors’ rates. I assume it’s the former. A second point of confusion is the tiny blurb at the top of the page to the right of the service name in the center, which advertises rates as low as NT$6/min, which is in conflict with the $5 elsewhere on the page.

NEXT, (to anyone considering this service)
I’ve just looked up the prices for all the major services, and although it’s a bit too complex (due to special deals, peak and non-peak rates, etc.) to properly evaluate the claim that [quote]It’s cheaper than any of the pay-as-you-go services[/quote], I can at least confirm that if you can’t get a mobile due to lack of an ARC, the per-minute prices are very reasonable when compared at the appropriate monthly minimums.

If you can get an ARC and expect fairly low phone bills each month, then you’re going to be better off getting an $88/mo. min. rate package at Chunghwa Telecom (or something similar) or an IF card, as Loretta has pointed out elsewhere. But that’s not TaiwanCell’s target audience.

As for SMS, the in-net/out-of-net costs per message are $1.3/1.7 at CHT, 2.5/3 at TCC, and 3/3 at FarEast. Unless you send gobs of SMS, I personally don’t see this as a major diff, although CHT is obviously the leader. The real cost on your bill is going to be the frequent and lengthy out-of-net (inter-net) calls, and the key is to ensure that you are on the same net as your SO!!!

I do have one question, though, Loretta - does the person have to choose a plan, or do they just pay the deposit, and then the min. monthly fee will be $840/mo, and if their usage is higher they automatically get the lower rates?

34

DB, thanks for the feedback. You’re correct in asking who my target market is.

It works like this:

If you’re not going to use the phone a lot then go with the pay-as-you-go services, or the NT$88 plan if you can get it. I can actually offer similar rates, but there’s not much profit in it. The profit comes when you use the phone more, and then it can get absurd if you’re with pay-as-you-go.

The operators charge massive mark-ups, so if you’re using the phone regularly then your bill gets outrageous very quickly. I remember I used to spend NT$2000 a month with IF, and was always trying to avoid using the phone. And I never knew what the price per minute actually was.

I’m charging less than the pay-as-you-go services, so my profit is lower, but to offer these rates I have to insist that you use the phone enough to pay my costs. It’s still not a lot though.

The target market is people who would like to use the phone without having to think about whether they are about to run out of credit. People who call friends to meet up, make a few work-related calls, and occasionally get drawn into a longer conversation.

120 minutes a month is an average of 4 minutes a day. I use my phone more than that, but then I never stop to think about whether I can afford it. On a contract my bill rarely reached NT$2000, and was usually 1000-1500. I would go for the NT$1200 plan = 200 minutes.

Note that I don’t do this ‘in-net’ and ‘out-net’ crap. One price for all calls to all mobiles, and I’m up-front about the cost of calls to land-lines. I was really upset when I eventually learned what those bastards charge for calls to ordinary numbers.

Finally, NO LONG-TERM CONTRACT!! (I’m revising the agreement today.)

35

If you can get an ARC and expect fairly low phone bills each month, then you’re going to be better off getting an $88/mo. min. rate package at Chunghwa (Zhonghua) Telecom (or something similar) or an IF card, as Loretta has pointed out elsewhere. But that’s not TaiwanCell’s target audience.[/quote]
You forget another advantage of TaiwanCell’s plan: you presumably will never get a message saying “contact system operator” when trying to send an SMS, upon which you call the service desk and get told that because you are a foreigner who might want to corrupt the morals of Taiwanese maidenhood or promote a Communist takeover of the island(*) or speak Engrish to a five-year-old, they are terminating your prepaid-card cellphone line and confiscating all of the prepaid credit on the account.

(*) only the KMT is allowed to promote a Communist takeover of the island.