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Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

Watch out for carriers in low tax EU environments poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam. Particularly if there is any sort of discrepancy between what the carrier pays to terminate a call elsewhere in Europe and what they pay to receive a call.

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     > Watch out for carriers in low tax EU environments
     > poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam

That sounds like an ideal situation, although as we've recently seen, companies need to be very careful with:

    > low tax EU environments

as the EU has shown itself willing to declare these illegal state subsidies retroactively.

Those were special tax deals for special companies. It's perfectly legal to just set a low tax rate, as long as it's universal.

There's already plenty of legislation about this sort of thing, unfortunately. For example you can drive your car from one EU country in any other EU country and your insurer has to cover you bu law(yes yes I know UK insurers only cover you for 60 days or so, which is stupid, but I think that's the UK law letting them do that), but you can't legally buy a car in say France and buy insurance in Germany. Since car insurance can be a lot cheaper in some EU countries than in others, I guess a lot of people would do that(but then again, if a lot of people were in fact doing it, the insurance prices would probably equalize eventually).

This is a great situation.

I moved from Ireland to Germany, where I was shocked to discover the stingy as f*ck data allowances that many German networks have. Sure, they have LTE everywhere, but what use is that when you are capped at 400 or 500 MB? It's like having a sports car and only being able to drive on a short track.

Now I can get a great deal in some other country (perhaps one with a low cost of living), and simply use that, with better service and lower cost.

But then you will get a phone number from another country. Will that add additional charge for others to call you?

They are in the EU also ;)

It's mainly data plans I use, Whatsapp/Viber/Telegram and skype over wifi for international calls. Phone calls are a minor thing for me.

> They are in the EU also ;)

I thought they capped just the roaming charges, isn't calling to mobile numbers in other EU countries still (relatively) expensive? My german carrier currently charges 20 times more for those.

As far as I've read that's unchanged. So roaming will be free but calling other numbers won't be. But I guess you'll see that the most popular providers will expand as smaller providers close down.

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