The New Zealand Commerce Commission reports that Kiwis are now getting a better deal on their mobile phone use.

Seven months after the Commerce Commission slashed mobile termination rates (the fees telecommunications companies charge one another for a call or text message originating from a rival network) by 50 per cent, mobile users are beginning to feel the ease in their wallets with the average cost of calls within networks and between networks narrowing between August and October this year.

The commission also noted that communications traffic between mobile networks increased during the same period.

The findings are detailed in the Commerce Commission's second mobile monitoring reportm, which analyses the price mobile users pay to call a mobile on the same network (on-net) against what they pay to call someone on a rival network (off-net), the New Zealand Herald reported.

The commission also said that between August and October there had been a 2.6 per cent decline in the price gap between on-net and off-net calls and a 5.5 per cent drop for text messages. At the same time, cross-network traffic had increased by 0.8 per cent for mobile calls and 3.2 per cent for text messages.

"The commission expects the on-net discount to continue to fall. These changes lessen the barriers to switching mobile providers, so consumers should no longer be discouraged from changing networks," Telecommunications Commissioner Dr. Ross Patterson told the Herald.