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girlwhowaspluggedout writes:
"The European Commission reports that, fearing high roaming charges, many EU citizens forgo the use of their mobile phones outside their home country. According to a survey done by the Commission (pdf), when travelling to another EU country, 90% of all EU citizens limit their e-mail use, 47% do not use their mobile internet connection, 33% never place calls, 25% do not text, and a staggering 28% simply turn off their mobile phones.
Roaming charges, the Commission suggests, are hurting the fledgling EU app sector. In trying to avoid paying data premiums, travelers limit their use of data-heavy apps, like travel guides, maps, and photo applications. Frequent travelers are even more likely to turn-off their phones, perhaps due to being better informed about the costs of data roaming.
The Commission reports that data roaming use across the EU has increased by 1500% since the introduction of price caps in 2008. It suggests that by eliminating all roaming charges, mobile providers will gain a further 300 million customers. These findings give further support to regulations proposed by the Commission that will create a single mobile phone market throughout the EU, enabling all customers to enjoy domestic rates when travelling within the EU."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday February 18 2014, @09:52PM
One thing I haven't understood for a while. It seems to me that it should have been the case for quite a while that there's very little marginal costs for things like roaming. Sure, maybe there were some initial headaches related to routing and billing and the like, but that should have been solved decades ago. And, just as with Internet peering, it should be in the carrier's mutual interests to work out easy ways to hand traffic off to each other in as transparent a manner as possible with as little bookkeeping as possible.
Am I naïve, or are roaming charges just a short-sighted excuse to bleed customers dry?
If the latter, I'd think that the first company to offer free roaming would steal significant numbers of customers away from the competition, which, again, just adds to the mystery....
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by WildWombat on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:05PM
If you look at how needlessly high roaming charges generally are I don't think its a mystery, just more of our corporate overlords fucking us as hard as they can.
As to why none of them offer free roaming in order to steal customers I don't think it would really work out for them, financially. Say they 'break truce' first and offer free roaming and start to steal customers. To start, they lose a significant amount of revenue from the lost roaming fees. Then, if they start to gain customers in large numbers, other carriers will join and that wave of new customers isn't going to last long. The question is is the permanent loss of the roaming fee revenue worth the number of customers you gain before the competing carriers match your offer? If not, keep the status quo. Unless you're a new entrant, which we see so many of because the barriers to entry in that market are so low....
I'd imagine some of the main carriers in the places where your customers might roam would also be hostile to reasonable roaming charges, I bet they get a pretty good cut of that, too, without any incentive at all to give it up.
Cheers,
WW
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:12PM
Then what we -- or, rather, the industry -- needs to get out of this mess is somebody who knows game theory.
It'd also be nice if there was some way, short of legislation, for "consumers" (a most hateful word) to band together to throw their own weight around. A consumers union, if you will, but more effective than the one run by Consumer Reports.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:16PM
So is this a regulatory failure, since competitors won't occur with the current rules?
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:07AM
Though their rates are still high the technology is interesting.
(Score: 1) by quitte on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:39PM
This looks like a scam to me. How does a sticker on a SIM card detect the country it's in? How does it change the cost of roaming? I guess all it is is a 35$ sticker that doesn't change your roaming fees at all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mojo chan on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:39AM
There is competition but they all collude to rip us off. Each charges the others high roaming fees, which are passed on to the customers. If one drops their fees it won't help their own customers, it just lets the competition make more profit on the call since the price to the consumer is fixed.
One of the best aspects of the EU is the way they come down hard on this kind of bullshit. Consumer protections are strong here.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:08AM
And yet the article is about high roaming charges that EU citizens face.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mindriot on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:28AM
Well, let's put that into perspective a bit.
I'm German but currently in the UK. My rates:
For a quick comparison, AT&T [att.com] charges 0.38 USD/min for both outgoing and incoming calls in Mexico and Canada, that's roughly 0.28 EUR/min. And that's only if you've put out 30 USD/month for their special plan -- otherwise it's 1.00 USD/min! And for Europe, we're talking 1.00 USD/min using the Travel Minutes package -- and 1.50 USD/min without.
So, the rates for EU citizens within the EU are already quite decent. But the main problem is, we are abroad a lot more than Americans. Imagine you had to pay those international roaming rates in every US state other than your home state. That's why the EU is trying to bring down the roaming charges even more.
soylent_uid=$(echo $slash_uid|cut -c1,3,5)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:02AM
Well, the permanent loss of roaming revenue is far more likely to affect EU carriers than say North American carriers.
After all, in the EU people cross borders all the time, on a whim. Everything is so close there. But unless you live on the Canadian or Mexican boarder you seldom cross boarders in North America.
You would think that North American carriers could drop roaming continent wide and not lose much revenue at all.
But before that happens, the amount that Bell Canada has to pay to get AT&T to handle a call in the US has to get down to something reasonable, such as the same amount AT&T demands of T-Mobile to handle a roaming AT&T customer's call.
This is the origin of these silly charges, actual costs imposed by the other carriers in a pointless attempt to get customers to switch to avoid roaming.
Now that these charges are largely eliminated between US carriers, at least for most plans, the US, Canadian, and Mexican carriers could allow roaming for free and save themselves the whole problem.
What we have is largely an Historical anachronism, which yields neither side much of a revenue stream.
The problem in Europe is exacerbated by the sheer number of carriers and the frequency of roaming opportunities.
Maybe when all carriers stop counting minutes, and give unlimited calling the whole problem will be too cheap to bother billing at all.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:12AM
I don't think it's a pointless attempt based on greed. It's simply a matter of who is paying for the bandwidth, and voice is still just bandwidth now at the end of the day. Even more so with new technologies like LTE.
Unlimited calling just shifts the game to roaming charges on data. They also have to make data flat rate regardless of location in order for that work.
What you may be ignoring is that once everything turns to data, a carrier giving away bandwidth to roaming customers must still pay their peering and transit costs. That roaming customer needs to be charged somehow to recoup those fees. They must pass that cost back on to the original carrier in the form of additional peering and transit costs.
I remember something about a book recently where the author discussed tactics to force carriers into free peering and transit agreements. Only reason why I bring it up, is that is where the real game with the money is being played.
It may not be presented as roaming charges, but it will still count toward your data plan. Smart carriers will enter into agreements that inspect the average roaming traffic on their network and then price their bandwidth packages accordingly.
(Score: 1) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @09:56PM
True the currently serving carrier has to bill something back to the carrier of record.
In actuality, all they bill is the Net(difference) between what A carried for B and what what B carried for A.
And that's fine. But I'm roaming on A, my home carrier, B, is not still getting paid by me, but not providing any service to me. The costs I impose on my home carrier drop to zero. (Doesn't matter if we are talking Voice Minuets or Data packets.)
So its not like its additional money out of my carriers's pocket, its money he was already collecting from me. He keeps his skim, sends the rest to the carrier on which I am roaming.
It shouldn't cost me (the end user) ANYTHING more.
(The sooner we get to it all being data packets the better. Makes the accounting so much easier.)
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by edIII on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:13PM
It can technically cost you more, and that all depends on the network size and makeup at any one moment. You just won't see it plainly on the bill.
Consider a tourist city on the coast of France. If they're are 25% roaming customers at any one moment, that's a pretty big hit to the carrier. They will pass those costs back off to you in one form or another. Otherwise they need to accept being less profitable, and that's unlikely.
So you do pay more, but it's in the form of a "tax" and not associated with your activity. Cities that are like this with high percentages of roaming customers will be more expensive.
Of course, it's more than likely national or multinational with large carriers, and those could decide to recoup the expense against all customers.
It does make it difficult to have locally owned cellular networks though. In such areas they have no choice but to raise the price if they find that many non-paying customers attaching to the network.
That brings up my final point. In order for their to be a net zero change the number of roaming customers on your network, and the number of your customers roaming on other networks, must be equal.
There are good examples where this is not true.
(Score: 1) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:41PM
Yes, I see how those charges must be passed back to the user's originating carrier.
But, there seems to be no reason why these should be that much higher. Maybe marginally higher to cover transactional costs, but realistically, that is all done by computer these days.
The roaming doesn't have to balance. There is always going to be imbalance, and charges from one carrier to the other. And locally owned carriers make BANK off of travelers roaming onto their network. Especially in resort towns.
The point I was trying to make, is that there will always be charges among carriers to pay for roaming.
But that should not affect the customer much, if at all. I'm not being a drain on my local carrier when I roam onto another carrier's tower. So ALL THE MONEY that I paid my carrier for that time is a windfall to my carrier. If they can then charge me EXTRA for roaming (instead of coughing up what I already paid to them), its sort of unfair to the end user.
Not saying there should be Zero Inter-Carrier money transfers. Just saying It should not affect the end-user to the extent it typically does.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by edIII on Friday February 21 2014, @04:55PM
The roaming does have to balance to have a net zero change for both carriers. Otherwise, they do have to pass on the cost. Typically in peering and transit you pay for that difference. It might be carrier A paying one day, and carrier B paying the next.
Locally owned carriers only make bank right now precisely because of unreasonable roaming costs. Those were created by unreasonable monetization plans from greedy execs that can't figure out that *always* going for the money does not *always* translate into the best business decision long term. Typically, over time those businesses get their asses handed to them, or if they are well enough connected, they bribe governments to forcefully assist them with their business models.
However, if we move to a deal with no roaming charges, and we move toward flat data, you simply must have peering and transit costs. Those are further complicated by the fact that not all network devices attached to the network are paying customers. So it's peering and transit, but also peering and transit for guest access as well. That's not normal, and you only see that with cellular. Traditional data networks have *all* access to their POPs paid for at the local rate. That can vary widely from network to network. I've seen datacenters in one city be 30% of the bandwidth costs or another city a few hundred miles away.
Locally owned carriers in resort towns are going to have major issues when they can't even bill the originating network for the traffic. They have to be able to at least bill it at the same rate they bill their customers. If they have a small user base, they are at an even bigger disadvantage in distributing the costs out to everyone equally. The point of that being you don't notice it all that much
That rate, will vary from resort town to resort town, and be substantially different than a city or rural area.A super huge carrier can just 'smooth' over those usage bumps and not care about it. You won't notice a thing probably. Pennies, if that.
The EU isn't like that though is it? From what I understand tourism is just ridiculous in some parts. There will be carrier networks in those places affected by large scale unpaid for usage. Spain was the top in 2012 with 234.4 million nights (which is days) spent by tourists. That's a metric crap load of bandwidth not paid for, that needs to be distributed out among the remaining paying population.
In situations like that, yes, you are going to see higher rates. I think it's unavoidable, but it can be significantly less than roaming costs. Probably 80% off at least if you only bill it to other carriers at just your standard wholesale rate determined by network traffic analysis and pricing.
What you want must be viewed as only data, part of peering and transit, and must have detailed analysis of all the network traffic and associated revenue. Only then can the costs come down to anywhere near reasonable. Which it means it comes down to execs being reasonable and not greedy, which does nothing for the almighty shareholder (citizen 1st class supreme).
I wish I could remember that damn book! It went into quite a bit of detail in the strategies for peering and transit networks. It's very disruptive, and pretty oool.
TL;DR It's like herding cats. Don't hold your breath waiting for it.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:33AM
I'm pretty sure we are plowing old ground here.
Lets not talks about roaming payments from one carrier to another for roaming, Ok?
We both know its happening, and has to continue.
However that does not mean the USER should have to pay these.
When I roam off of AT&T, (say to T-Mobile) I impose no burden on AT&T. I use no bandwidth, I use no minutes, I use no connections to their towers. I COST AT&T nothing.
Yet I pay them the same.
So that percentage of my bill, for the time that I am off of AT&T and roaming onto T-Mobile, should just be transferred by AT&T to T-Mobile.
Now don't tell me this can't happen, or that it can't be that simple. It can happen, and I am on such a plan. I have a nation wide business plan right now from AT&T which is just pennies more than a paid roaming plan. Not enough more to cover even a few roaming calls. I can and have spent a week on T-Mobile and Bell South towers, taking and making calls with zero difference in my bill.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2, Informative) by everdred on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:02AM
> ...none of them offer free roaming in order to steal customers...
Wait, isn't this precisely what T-Mobile is doing now [t-mobile.com]?
We don't take no shit from a machine.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:53AM
One of the reason that it might have occurred is not applicable to huge countries like the USA. However, where there are numerous smaller countries with significant price differentials in telecom services, having low roaming charges would encourage people to buy their phone in country A only to always use it in country B in order take advantage of the savings to be made. Having high roaming charges prevents this.
However, in the EU there are meant to be no barriers to such trade - all countries and companies in those countries compete against each other. The EU believes that roaming charges shouldn't be imposed simply as a method of market protection. If your running costs as a company are high they should be spread fairly amongst all those who use your infrastructure and not penalise those who are not your primary customer. People living in border areas are often hit with high prices simply because the strongest signal comes from a tower in a neighbouring country. Yes, it is possible to block this as a user but many only know how to turn it on and make a call. It stays switched on for most of its lifetime.
It's always my fault...
(Score: 1) by ArmoredDragon on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:20PM
Seems rather strange to me. With T-Mobile I can roam to AT&T, or even travel abroad to Canada or Europe not see any roaming charges so long as I only use data (easy fix: Skype.) I pay $23 per month per phone on a 5 line family plan on t-mobile. Data is only limited to 500mb of LTE data, after that it goes to Edge which isn't so bad (in spite of being very tech savvy, I'm not a heavy data user at all, except on my home broadband connection.)
I never see an overage though; my bill never changes from $114.65 a month. I can call anywhere to the US/Canada, third party premium texts are blocked, and international calling is blocked (both deliberately and I can unblock them at any time if I want to.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:09PM
Simple: corporate greed. They can so they do. After hearing over and over how much cheaper and better cell phone service is everywhere than here, this makes me feel good. I have no roaming charges, data caps, or minutes to buy, unlimited everything for forty bucks a month. I've been with them for years.
Which underscores your question: why do we let our corporate overlords rip us off like that?
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Nobuddy on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:12PM
AFIAK it is a matter of ripping each other off. It is hard for Provider X to give free roaming if providers Y and Z charge them for their customers using their networks. And vice versa, giving free roaming to their customers means your competition makes a larger profit from your actions because we all know they will charge those customers anyway.
I am from the USA, and when I travel in the EU I tend to carry several SIM cards and pop in the one that fits my current location. This is, sadly, the most cost effective way to do it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gorath99 on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:51AM
I've been told that it's also a problem of competing interests between EU members. It's effectively a redistribution of wealth from the countries with comparatively little tourism to the countries with a lot of tourism. So countries like Spain and Italy are in favor of high roaming costs whereas countries like Denmark and The Netherlands are opposed.