Because in the U.S., local land-line calls are not metered.

Here, when making a local call, it's free, so when you call a wireless user, somebody has to pay for the airtime. I guess they decided that here, it's not fair to make the caller pay for the airtime, so the cellphone owner always pays for it. Because local calls here are free, we don't have a system set up for metering them. More importantly, mobile phones here do not have their own area codes (as is the case in Europe), so a caller here has no way of knowing whether they're calling a landline or a wireless phone. That would be VERY bad if landline calls were free, mobile calls metered, and nobody could tell which is which!

So the upshot is that here, the wireless owner pays the airtime, but when YOU call someone onto their mobile phone from a landline, it's free. So it all works out to be about the same in the end!

tooki