A lot of people complaining here. I am based in Luxembourg currently, and went to London last week. The peace of mind of landing in a foreign city and being able to use your phone as if at home truly is incredible. I could really feel the barriers to traveling fading. (Ironic that it was London, I know). BTW, my Luxembourghish telco actually aligned with the EU directive ahead of time (June 1st).
Agreed. I now use Google Fi (free roaming in 150 countries) but that didn't use to exist.
When I was doing an internship in Switzerland about 9 years ago I often travelled to nearby countries on weekends and internet access was always a problem. Free Wi-Fi was largely nonexistent back then, and roaming charges were upwards of USD15 per megabyte (yes, mega). Simply trying to use Google Maps to get to a hostel might cost more than the cost of staying at the hostel. And being on a prepaid plan, there was always the risk of accidentally clicking on an ad and burning up all of the quota that I purchased, leaving me stranded without internet access.
I relied mostly on printed paper maps that summer.
I always thought it made zero sense in a part of the world where crossing country borders could be an everyday occurrence especially if you live close to a border.
I also thought it made absolutely zero sense that the various Oranges and various T-Mobiles of different countries don't have free roaming plans with each other. Why didn't Orange UK, Orange France, Orange Switzerland, Orange Egypt, Orange Romania, etc. work together to give free calls and free internet access on each others' networks, routing everything over IP? They could have won over a bunch of business customers by doing that and killed some competitors.
> Why didn't Orange UK, Orange France, Orange Switzerland, Orange Egypt, Orange Romania, etc. work together to give free calls and free internet access on each others' networks
Because they made boatloads of profit from charging their customers for roaming.
Sure, but they could instead sweep all the customers away from their competition since the same parent company has a foot in multiple countries. They could have even undercut business from Skype by offering almost-free roaming.
Also, if roaming charges are prohibitively expensive, people just stop using roaming. If they are at least reasonable, they will profit significantly more because people will actually use it. At $15/MB I just shut my phone off. They're not making any money from me.
> At $15/MB I just shut my phone off. They're not making any money from me.
They didn't need you. Their real customers back at the time were businessmen with next-to-unlimited travel funds.
These days it has changed because especially young people demand being able to Instagram/Snapchat their travels from anywhere... but still data in Germany is horribly expensive.
As an American who likes to travel to Europe, this is a godsend. I can buy a pre-paid SIM before I leave America and then use it all over Europe. Getting a TIM (Italy, 35 Euro for one month) SIM was a real pain in the ass and I would love to have found somewhere else to make the process much easier and cheaper.
You could also just use Google's Project Fi. My biggest complaint about them is it takes about 10 minutes to get an LTE connection when switching continents (which is basically to say I have no complaints).
