At first sight a cost comparison table of some sort sounds a good idea.
On second thoughts, I doubt how useful it would be in practice.
What the pre-dial options are doing is giving everybody the choice of what suits them best.
To use you as an example A1ia5, you choose SMS because they are inclusive, and you would probably still do so if a comparison table showed another method was cheaper!
Similarly, someone with p&g balances to get rid of, may well decide to use premium SMS, irrespective of where they sit in some price comparison table.
The actual costs to users depends as much on what they have surplus to their needs as it does on any theoretical calculations I suggest.
Agree with you Dave - What Pre-dial is doing is providing many ways to produce credits for the services. This is tremendous !
In my first post I was trying to generalise for the benefit of all users. Ok, my interest in this would be as a way to use up small amounts of credit on PAYG. What I'm primarily interested in is getting the most Pre-dial credits for the credit on the SIM. So for a given mobile provider, PAYG tarriff and PAYG credit amount, what would be the best single or combination of ways to maximise the gained Pre-dial credit ? A table or several tables would perhaps best present this.
This is also useful now as I have many sims with small amounts of credit on I would like to use, before porting the no away. I don't particularly want to lose the credit, but would do so as the eventual gain will be greater than the loss.
It also provides more income to Mikael, that may well be lost otherwise.
If you have any other ideas on how small amounts of PAYG credit can be converted into something else that is useful, then that would be of interest.
Of course a key dependence here is on Pre-dial continuing to offer the service, and store and redeem credits. And of course Pre-dial is dependent upon the telecoms providers stumping up payments and not weaseling out because of things like AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) - which telecoms providers do (or should) keep very accurate details on and know typical profiles...