Does Anyone Know the REAL Roaming Costs Incurred by Carriers?

[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.

A long time ago I happened to see a price list from one overseas carrier as to what they actually paid various carriers in other countries. I can't recall any of the figures and by now it would be seriously outdated. Besides, I am sure I was under an NDA at the time. At that time, rates varied not only from country to country, but rates varied among diff. carriers within a country. I would guess that's still true.
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. The roaming cost is the same whether a customer roams on a T-M system or another system in a given country.

...mike

[inquisitor]

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.

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.

[andy]

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.

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

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.

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.