That's … not how it actually works if you are in Germany. Typically you get a flatrate or minutes to landline and two prices for mobile calls: One for calls to your carrier, one for calls to other carriers. You might, for examle, have 120 minutes for calls to people with your carrier and 19 cent/minute to other carriers (and if you go over the 120 minutes).

It's actually not so complicated, but it's certainly often a good idea to know which carrier someone is using when you are calling them on the mobile phone. There are, however, also plans that treat all carriers the same.

Uh, here in Portugal I pay exactly the same - 8 eurocents/min - for any network, both mobile and landline. And we don't pay for receiving calls.

If I have a cell phone number in Toronto, move to Montreal, and call somebody across the street in Montreal... I pay the rate from Toronto to Montreal.

I know because I was surprised with $400 cell phone bills maxing out my credit cards after a few months over there, thinking the exact same thing, that I paid "the rate from their location to the destination area code" - which we do not.

In Canada you generally pay long-distance rates (~$0.40/minute) when you: -Call a number with a different area code (and sometimes the same one because some area codes are very large and actually have multiple zones) -When you call a number in your own area code but you aren't in that area code (when you're in another city) -Receiving calls when you're outside of your area code

Most people are on multi-year contracts with substantial break frees (in the $200 range). There are also charges to change your number and so on and so on...