On Friday, October 12, 2001 wrote:
"I live in California and recently visited Australia. My local network
provider charges me about $2.50 per minute for international roaming plus
long-distance charges of about $2.50 a minute. So to call home from
Australia costs me about $5 per minute on my GSM phone.
By buying a pre-paid simm card, I was able to call back home for 20 minutes
for less than $10 Australian. In other words, $0.25US vs $5.00, a 20X markup
for somone."
Let me guess, your provider is Cingular wireless if you are using GSM
service on the west coast. It also happens to be my SP and I am fuming as a
user on the outrageous ripp-off fees for roaming they charge. Again, it is
not the visited network that is the culprit but the home network. Cingular
came up with the "brilliant" scheme to have only 3 roaming tariffs, at the
charges you saw. And as you saw, there is a huge markup they add on for
calls they get charged by the visited operator for possibly $0.30US. Sending
an SMS using a Cingular SIM for roaming is even worse! They round the
message up to a normal voice minute, so on average an SMS costs about $0.15
all over the world, with Cingular then marking it up to $5.00 - nice 1000%
mark-up. Then they wonder why outbound roaming does not take off in the US!
I tried to talk to someone at the network and all they could say is that
roaming is not used that much. I am not surprised. This is exactly what
happens when there is no competition and operators have a monopoly in the
area. I can only say, if you want to go roaming on a US SIM, don't bother,
just get a prepay SIM at your destination - it is much cheaper!
"I cant believe roaming is such a rip-off in Asia or Europe. I know people
who live in Taiwan and use a Hong Kong phone, so they cant be paying all
that much extra for 'roaming'."
Again, it is not the visited network but the home network who is marking up
the roaming calls to what ever they want - as you see in the worst example
of them all, by the US GSM operators. The visited network normally charge
the home network a standard small service fee per call.
Maria
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Received on Tue Oct 16 14:13:01 2001