How much are you paying for cell service? Would you believe $3 a minute?

Shocking headline? You better believe it. Like most consumers, I feel like I'm getting a pretty good deal on my cell phone service, paying about 40 bucks a month for 450 minutes worth of talk time, including unlimited nights and weekends, rollover minutes, and all that good stuff.

The problem for me -- and for most of the free world, it seems -- is that I don't use anywhere close to 450 minutes a month on my cell. And when you take an average of a few hundred cell phone bills, dividing how much the users really pay vs. the minutes they really use, you get some shocking figures indeed. According to a study from San Diego's Utility Consumers' Action Network, the average cost of a wireless call is, in reality, a shocking $3.02 per minute.

Wow.

Why so high? The average customer uses only 32 percent of his minute allotment, and some customers pay up to $100 a month (not including all those unadvertised fees and taxes, which push the costs even higher) for unlimited service, making for an even worse deal in the end. (Take out the worst outliers who pay a lot and use no minutes and the average is still around 75 cents a minute for cell service.)

The numbers are better, but still bad, for land-line long distance, where consumers pay an average of 55 cents per minute for long distance, when all fees are truly accounted for. It probably doesn't help that, according to the study, "90 percent of AT&T and Verizon phone bills are improperly taxed."

The goal of the UCAN report is to raise awareness of what consumers are really paying on their phone bills by quantifying their expenses in detail, while also questioning whether deregulation has lived up to claims that it would save customers money in the long run. (The report's claim is that it definitively has not.)

How much are you really paying in phone service? Take a look at your bill to see how many minutes you actually use and compare that against what you really pay each month. You might be shocked by what you find.

Via LA Times