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Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will peer-pressure US carriers to follow suit.

Unlikely, if anything, the US carriers will double down on roaming fees. They tend to do whatever it takes to prevent becoming what the European carriers have become, just a line supplier.

I do not know, how the US carriers fare, but the "just line suppliers" of Europe and particularly of Germany are faring very, very well! They still make tons of money for sometimes lowest-level service.

Of course, when you have much, you still can fare better and make even more profits ...

Seems like the very existence of roaming fees indicates that the European carriers were behaving very much like US carriers.

Why would US carriers double down on roaming fees? I don't see how it's in any way related to this.

Who is paying roaming charges in the US on any of the major carriers?

I've used both AT&T and Verizon and haven't had to worry about roaming charges for a decade.

There are no roaming charges inside of US, are there?

There can be roaming charges and roaming data caps inside the US although they're not very common with the major carriers. The only time I've specifically encountered a cap with AT&T (I have a grandfathered "unlimited" plan) was when I was in Furnace Creek in Death Valley. (For those not familiar, Furnace Creek is quite isolated but it did get cell phone service a few years back.)

As others have said, international roaming is very expensive without a specific plan. I left early on a trip to Europe last winter because of a snowstorm and before I knew it I had a big bill because I had used my phone in Toronto airport and my roaming service wasn't scheduled to begin for a couple of days. Fortunately, AT&T moved the start time for the international service earlier for me.

AFAIK AT&T always lets you buy International plan add ons back to beginning of the current bill cycle. Still a rip.

T-Mobile has 'free international data' but it's 2G speeds (capped at 128 kbps) and the upsell is a rip, $50 for half a GB.

AT&T's system for international add-ons on their site is a lot better than it used to be when you had to explicitly cancel the plan over the phone when you got back home.

I'm happy enough with their offerings. I suppose there are circumstances where I'd just buy a SIM card for my old phone when I arrived at the airport, but for most purposes I'm fine with paying $30 for 120MB or whatever it is. It's no hassle and serves my purposes for a week of travel or so.

Sprint is the slowest us mobile carrier but they've had free 2g roaming in Mexico and Canada and recently upgraded that to 3G I haven't tried to use them outside of those areas (and tbh I wouldn't expect it to work since it's not gsm) but for traveling in some subset of the Western Hemisphere, sprints not too bad.

I used the T-Mobile roaming data for a two month trip this year and was really happy with it. It may not be fast but it's pretty useful to have messaging, VOIP, and maps ready to go as soon as the plane lands.

T-Mobile's free international roaming has been great. I used to always pick up a sim from a vending machine at Heathrow, but now I don't bother. 2G is fine for email, light web browsing and navigation.

In France, TMO free international was phenomenally useful even at 128Kb/s. You can't stream video, but I was able to get some data in the most remote places.

There are no rules against roaming charges, so it depends on the plan.

I believe that most plans don't have roaming charges within the United States. Mine certainly doesn't. It's hard to have a competitive plan that has roaming charges.

Roaming charges outside the United States can be quite high. I have to watch carefully who I'm connected to when I'm near the Canadian border.

There are; outside of each carrier's coverage. Tho some carriers don't have roaming charges.

In the US you still get charged by the minute for "extended local area" on landline plans.

So yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

Well, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's, which is what led to rapid and and widespread adoption of mobile on that continent in the first place.

> Well, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's

Wait... what? Bell used to charge me more for a basic landline in Montreal than I paid for 20Mpbs internet + free unlimited international calls + a hundred TV channels or so in France. The historical operator's plan for bare landline was cheaper as well.

That was back in 2007 so maybe things have changed, but from my experience landline costs in Canada were hugely more expensive than in France. I actually ended up using my parents' VoIP account (provided on the aforementioned plan) to call Canadian lines most of the time because it was cheaper than using my phone. Perhaps generalising "North America" and "Europe" just doesn't work in this case, though.

AFAICR dialup was pay-by-the-minute (for call costs) in Germany.

dialup was the same cost as a normal phone call.

But 16mbps DSL was available in most areas since 2003.

What I was pointing out is there is a lot of inertia that would prevent any telephone company from changing the practice. Particularly since the consolidation of mobile carriers means most people rarely are in a roaming area.

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