Quote:
Originally Posted by snidely
What I can't understand is why a company like T-M doesn't encourage its own customers to roam on its own systems in other countries.
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With German providers roaming rates varied depending on the actual network before, but nowadays they have flat tariffs for each country, too.
The reason maybe that most customers are incabale of performing a manual network selection and because a lot of modern SIM cards contain a value called "EFspn", which is the service provider name. Depending on additional parameters on the SIM card and on how your mobile phone handles that "EFspn"-value it will either show EFspn + network name simultaenously or it will permanently switch between both names or it will completely override the name of the serving network by the EFspn. You may have noticed e.g. that when using a United Mobile SIM, the display said "United Mobile", allthough there is no such network anywhere in the world.
EFspn is mostly used by MVNOs, who want their brand name to appear in the display instead of the serving network, but also by MNOs who don't want competitors' names to appear in their customers' displays while roaming (especially during national roaming, which may convey the impression of inferior coverage). So subscribers often can't actually see which network they're registered on and so any incentive of using a group-owned network would be senseless.