People are spending 62 per cent longer making international phone calls from the SAR than two years ago after competition between rival networks led to ferocious price-cutting.
Far more people are now dialling out of Hong Kong than in, with outgoing international direct-dial (IDD) calls amounting to 90 seconds a day for every person, according to official figures obtained by the South China Morning Post.
The cost of making overseas calls has plunged since the IDD market was opened to competition in January last year, and rates for popular destinations have gone below 30 cents a minute, with several networks even offering free calls at certain times to lure a greater share of telephone traffic.
Figures compiled by the Office of the Telecommunications Authority show that people made almost four million hours of international calls in April, compared with 3.3 million hours in April last year, and 2.5 million for the same month in 1998.
'People now just pick up the phone and dial, but if you look at what they were paying a few years ago, people were timing their conversations and keeping them short,' New T&T director Tony Cheung Tung-lan said. 'People's talk-time has gone up - in our case the average time on calls to China has gone up by almost 40 per cent - and the number of calls made has also gone up.
'The discounting has made people very price-conscious - whenever we lower the prices, the response is fairly immediate. A lot of people are maintaining accounts with a number of suppliers and whenever they want to make a call, they check the prices before they punch in the IDD access code.' CTI Telecom chairman Ricky Wong Wai-kay said prices had halved in the past two years, leading to a change in telephone culture since the high-priced days of the mid-1990s. 'We've noticed that in 1995 or 1996, the average call duration was normally about four minutes per call. Now it's more like seven or eight,' he said. 'People are talking for longer and calling more often. Nobody worries about price anymore.' A spokeswoman for Cable & Wireless HKT said the recovering economy had also led to an increase in IDD calls made by businesses, and agreed that widespread price-cutting was spurring more home users to pick up the phone. 'The discount offers have encouraged people to use more IDD time. Residential customers are making more IDD calls, but as far as we understand, the call duration is not dramatically longer than before,' she said.