Does Anyone Know the REAL Roaming Costs Incurred by Carriers?

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by snidely

Hate to sound as an apologist for the cell carriers -but ships use satellites for internet. That is very expensive. The sat. internet providers charge by the mb. I assume that cell phone services on ship connect the same way.

Not all that expensive. Yes, calls via INMARSAT are expensive but the way the cruise ships are set up is that they have a high bandwidth, full-time satellite connection. This serves all their data needs and most of their ship-to-shore communications needs. Most crew-calling shipboard solutions run about $1-$1.50/min. On US Navy ships you will often find a phone for the sailors personal use. They buy prepaid cards in the ships store for about $1/min, as I recall. So, roaming at $2.50/min is expensive. $4.50/min is just obscene. Being charged that price anywhere is obscene. OTOH, receiving a SMS and sending via FishText or smsBug is a good deal. You can stay in touch with home 24/7 for almost nothing.

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

The ultimate result was the break up of the bell system...one of the most reliable systems in the world was broken into composite parts....

The deal on AT&T's long-distance monoploy and cross-ownership of most of the telcos in the US was that they were prohibited from engaging in other business. They really wanted to get into other business lines, particularly computer systems. So, breaking up the AT&T monopoly was as much thier idea as anyone else's.

[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.

[inquisitor]

That different font is obviously a result of how your phone interprets the EF SPN-data from you SIM card.
According to 3GPP TS 31.102 there are only the following options for the EF SPN value:

• b1=0: display of registered PLMN name not required when registered PLMN is either HPLMN or a PLMN in the service provider PLMN list (see EFSPDI).
• b1=1: display of registered PLMN name required when registered PLMN is either HPLMN or a PLMN in the service provider PLMN list(see EFSPDI).
• b2=0: display of the service provider name is required when registered PLMN is neither HPLMN nor a PLMN in the service provider PLMN list(see EFSPDI).
• b2=1: display of the service provider name is not required when registered PLMN is neither HPLMN nor a PLMN in the service provider PLMN list(see EFSPDI).
  RFU (see TS 31.101)

So providers can define when to show the provider name, but not how.

[rggoldie]

Originally Posted by petkow

Well, consider what T-Mobile Germany pays when a customer of theirs uses T-Mobile USA? At the end of the day they are both owned by Deutsche Telekom!

In Australia, for example, I can roam with Three in Europe and pay much less if I am on a Three network in the country I am in. For example, data costs 50c/MB in Italy if I am on Three Italy and around $20/MB if I am on a different network.

Rupert

[MATHA531]

Originally Posted by rggoldie

In Australia, for example, I can roam with Three in Europe and pay much less if I am on a Three network in the country I am in. For example, data costs 50c/MB in Italy if I am on Three Italy and around $20/MB if I am on a different network.

Rupert

3 did that as well for some of its European customers but as I think I have read, it's ending that.

Also, Australia is a poor example as the way mobiles operate is more or less on the European model (caller pays the entire freight) than the North American model (you pay for air time whether sending or receiving).

Also a factor in all this is that gsm (I know it's a 2g technology and is slowly becoming outdated but it will be around for a while longer) is far from the predominant technology used in the USA. The largest carrier, by far, is Verizon which is not gsm. AT%T (originally Cingular of course) is a fairly recent convert to gsm. Only T Mobile has been gsm from the start. We also have had to put up with the added inconvenience of the different gsm frequencies here as opposed to the rest of the world although again quad band technology has for the most part resolved that problem (although there are still people walking around with tri bands, say 850, 1800, 1900 who run into trouble in a country such as Croatia which is predominantly 900)

Although I would like to believe otherwise, we're still a ways away from the concept of one universal phone number to use cell phone technology globally at affordable rates.