December 23, 2010 3:00pm by David Farrar

Mobile termination rates coming down

The Commerce Commission says the cost of switching phone calls and texts between mobile networks should drop sharply from April next year.

In a draft decision, the regulator says the cost of mobile termination rates should be cut from about 17 cents a minute to 4.7 cents a minute.

The price would gradually drop to 3.9 cents by April 2014.

For texts, the commission is recommending what is known as a “bill and keep model”, under which phone companies do not charge each other for routing messages, partly because the cost is already low.

This means that telcos can now afford to do text packages that won’t be restricted to recipients on their networks only.

Just under 5c a minute for phone termination is not too bad either.