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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

The problem right now is: if I am in Italy and I send an SMS to a French phone (regardless of where it actually is) I spend 30 cents as this is not regulated in any way by the roaming laws. On the other hand if I'm roaming and I send an SMS to any cell phone in Europe I pay 7 cents.

This means that most of the time if you have someone visiting you there is a huge asymmetry in prices when corresponding, the only problem is: I don't know how they're ever going to address this.

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Are PAG deals still popular in Italy? pretty much every contract but the absolute cheapest one in most EU countries I've seen comes with unlimited SMS, even the lowest ones usually come with like 2000...

That usually doesn't include SMS sent to foreign phones which seems to be the problem here.

There are plans to fix this next year, i.e. starting from mid-2017 you are going to pay home tariff [1] (i.e. 30 cents per SMS to France) wherever you are in EU.

[1] http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2015/10/27/news/parlamen...

Actually, that shouldn’t be possible.

The EU limited cross-national SMS to 10ct per SMS, and 10ct per minute of phone calls, too.

Are you sure? I have never heard that nor could I find anything in the roaming regulation. I just checked a few (German) mobile providers and all charge more than you suggest.

I know ALDI Talk changed theirs down with the justification that "the EU roaming regulations also apply to calling from your home country to another country".

Telekom still charges up to a euro per minute and the price list was updated last week: http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/43777.pdf I know why I'm not a customer there...

Wow, that’s impressive. There’s another good reason not to use T-Mobile.

Aldi Talk costs only 0,12€ to US, Canada, Mexico, and only 0,11€ to EU (same as nationally).

My Austrian provider charges 80ct per minute to call other EU countries. (SMS are cheaper because the rate for SMS is independent of the destination country).

Calling other countries is not roaming.

Yes, but that's the issue that the original post in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11601100) discussed (calling other countries from your home countries is more expensive than calling other countries while roaming).

Why communicate through SMS rather than over the internet?

Have you seen the prices for data roaming?

(Especially since apps tend to send data automatically and also because you're one surprise sync or app store update away from financial catastrophe.)

Data roaming prices got better with this change, but are still somewhat high.

Two of the 4 major US carriers are able to offer free (but somewhat slow) data roaming in Europe, and the other two sell relatively cheap packages for data roaming. How can US carriers offer cheaper roaming in Europe than European carriers themselves?

Some European networks offer this too, but it is not required by regulation.

It sounds like in this case it wouldn't be data roaming, it'd be local data for the parent in Italy. If it was roaming then both SMS and data would now be regulated.

Data roaming is usually cheap if you pay up front. When I travel I pay a €5 fee for unlimited data for 24hrs. It doesn't allow tethering or film streaming but everything else is covered. I can even use it for Skype calls.

Using the internet eliminates the need to roam (versus simply getting a local SIM with data at the airport). The POTS is dead.

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