[RANT] Why Phone Roaming SUCKS

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “[RANT] Why Phone Roaming SUCKS”.
You know what really boils my peanuts. I can’t take a trip anywhere without being charged where the Sun don’t shine with roaming fees, even though calling home or sending a text is an incredibly trivial matter. From a technical perspective, I mean I can hop on Facebook Messenger right now. I have a voice conversation with my homeboy in Italy for absolutely no additional charge zero. But if I flew to Rome and try to use my data connection, I’d get a bill that might make my mortgage payment look like chump change seriously.

A few years ago, a guy traveling to Mexico on business got a bill of over two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars just for streaming a hockey game. What possible reason could your carrier have for charging so much? Okay, so get this, even though the bill you get might have the name of your home wireless carrier on it. The responsibility for this kind of price gouging, ultimately lies with whatever foreign carrier owns the network that you were using, and it used to be the case that the logistics of providing roaming service were a little more difficult for mobile carriers during the earlier part of the 2000S, it was difficult for them to track just how many minutes or how much data was being used as communication between networks wasn’t very good. So these logistical issues made it a lot more tempting for mobile carriers to try and recoup any losses by jacking up prices.

But these days improvements in technology have made it such that is really easy for mobile networks in Australia to talk to one in the US. For example, when someone travels between the two countries, so why are we still paying so much part of the issue is the way deals are done between providers from different countries. You see if you use a major carrier in your home country, they probably have dozens or even hundreds of contracts in place with foreign providers. These are all negotiated individually and although it doesn’t cost very much more to connect a call across the world than it does in the same city, foreign carriers have no incentive to charge reasonable prices to folks who are roaming and the home carrier doesn’t want to make It super cheap to roam on their own networks, as a foreign carrier could then swoop in and undercut them potentially siphoning off the local customers.

For example, if a US carrier was able to offer extremely roaming across the border in Canada, a Canadian user might just buy a u.s. cell service and permanently roam in Canada on a Canadian company cell towers making matters worse. Many countries only have a very small handful of major carriers servicing them think about how the u.s.

mobile market is essentially a four way dance between Verizon Sprint AT .