

Why Roaming Costs Are Unjustified - cleis
http://opensignal.com/blog/2013/03/18/why-roaming-costs-are-unjustified/

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afreak
One of the idiotic complaints I've seen from users living near the border here
in Vancouver (around the White Rock/Blaine area) is that they get "gouged" by
the mobile phone carrier for roaming charges after picking up either Rogers,
AT&T, or T-Mobile depending on where they are. And when the carrier forgives
the bill, the users then complain that the company should do more to stop
signals from over-powering the other, forgetting that these towers are built
to keep that in mind.

I asked a friend of mine who used to live in the area what he did to prevent
being charged for roaming and he basically told me that while he could
manually set his phone phone to his carrier (Rogers), he chose not to because
it was far easier to just move around the house and wait for the roaming to
stop as he would prefer to let it switch when he does cross the border since
it's only 2 KM away.

It's a bit ineffective as I keep my phone locked to my carrier's ID but how
can people already aware of this problem not do the same? Roaming charges are
garbage sometimes but there has to be a level of responsibility on the
customer to keep an eye on these things if they're close enough to another
(foreign) network.

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rm999
Technology should 'just work' or err on the side of not inconveniencing
people. There's no reason a design error (what do you mean the towers are
built to keep that in mind?) should affect customers in their own homes. Not
only do most people not want to fiddle with their phone's advanced settings,
many people don't even know how.

I used to run into the same issue in san diego. I would be hiking 25 miles
from the Mexican border (well north of downtown) and periodically get texts
from at&t welcoming me to Mexico. I kept data roaming off so I would just
temporarily lose my connection, but it's still a ridiculous text to get when
I'm well within a major american urban area.

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guan
I wonder why there isn’t more roaming competition. Roaming users actually have
a choice of carriers: my AT&T phone will never connect to a non-AT&T network
in the US. In other countries there are usually 3 or 4 networks different
networks I can connect to. (My phone is SIM locked, but I’m roaming with an
AT&T SIM.) Why doesn’t one of those advertise to travelers and say “Use
Carrier X, we’re 90% cheaper”. Is it because they can’t convince AT&T to pass
on the savings?

