How does paying by the minute compare to paying by the second?
Paying by the minute is obviously more expensive than paying by the second, but exactly how this impact upon your monthly bill does. To begin, we need to look at the statistical average overpayment that rounding-up incurs. On the low end, the overpayment is 0 seconds, since you might make a call that is exactly 3 minutes for example. At the high end, the overpayment is 59 seconds, since you could conceivable go 1 second over the boundary. If we assume that your call times are randomly distributed, then the long-term average overpayment is 30 seconds per call.
Paying by the minute is obviously more expensive than paying by the second, but exactly how does this impact upon your monthly bill. To begin, we need to look at the statistical average overpayment that rounding-up incurs. On the low end, the overpayment is 0 seconds, since you might make a call that is exactly 3 minutes for example. At the high end, the overpayment is 59 seconds, since you could conceivable go 1 second over the boundary. If we assume that your call times are randomly distributed, then the long-term average overpayment is 30 seconds per call. Based on that average, we can easily determine how much more airtime you paid for by simply counting the number of individual calls you made during a given month. If you made 150 calls for example, that would use up, on average, an extra 75 minutes of airtime than if you’d been paying by the second. However, just because you consumed an extra 75 minutes doesn’t mean it will actually cost you anything. That depends upon whether you
