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Originally Posted by snidely
So far no one has come up w. hard figures as to what, for example, Vodafone pays ATT or T-Mobile for each minute one of their customers is roaming on those U.S. systems. My guess is that it is pennies. After all, they each sell lots of minutes to MVNO companies that use their systems - and those MVNOs can make a profit by reselling those minutes for 10 cents or so.
The same for U.S. customers who go to the UK. My guess is that ATT and T-M pay less than 10 cents a minute to the various carriers since they, essentially, buying huge quantities of minutes. Since they charge 99 cents (ATT charges $1.29 for some customers) - that's an outrageous mark-up.
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Roaming in or from USA has always been more expensive than other places, and you probably need to knock on the door of the US networks and ask them why. Same for others such as India. My guess is that they charge 20 to 50 cents a minute wholesale to visitors, not 10 or less. The lowest retail rates there are down to about 40 eurocents now, which might have only a few cents margin together with receipt of the termination fee on the visitor's number
Quote:
Originally Posted by inquisitor
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.
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In the case of congstar, they use a different font which doesn't show up on some phones, so the screen is blank and for a moment you might think there's no signal. It took me a couple of minutes to remember this last week, after doing a network search and the top of the list was also blank.