Europe needs a European wide network carrier
Here’s a thought: For this mobile web to really work, we need a European wide network carrier.
If I was living in the US, I could pick one of the big carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon and use their service across all states. In Europe… No such thing. There are some alliances between some carriers but there is no such thing as a European wide carrier and frankly they don’t do a very good job at promoting these alliances.
I travel all over Europe and thus I always need to be aware of the fact that I am always roaming. And roaming is still freaking expensive. Sure, Adobe does pay my mobile bill but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about how much it costs.
Most of the European carriers are owned by only a handful of big telcos (like France Telecom, Vodafone, …). It is definitely possible to make this happen. I honestly don’t know why we don’t already have a European wide carrier… But then… I guess that these big telcos don’t mind making truckloads of money from frequent travelers like myself… *sigh*
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I guess that the EU would start screaming bloody murder and invoke this and that anti-monopoly law.
Yes, it’s easy to do that in the US but we need to remember that that is, for all regards, just one country, not many who happen to be under one “patronage”.
Ciao,
Better would be a roaming Call/Data charge plan/fee.
Alessandro
I know the EU is trying to bring roaming taxes down : http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/index_en.htm , but they’re actually focusing on texting and phone calls.
And don’t believe that having the same carrier doesn’t mean roaming taxes. It happened to me twice, I went to Greece, had a Cosmote Romania number and paid for roaming while being connected to Cosmote Greece. And the same thing in France, with Orange, although I had the same carrier (just the Romanian division), I paid the same taxes as any other carrier would.
So as you said, it’s just easy money for them.
I think a fixed price (per month) for roaming would be great: you could keep the same rate for your phone calls and especially use your data plan.
I’m going often in France but refuse to use data roaming there, it would be too expensive!
My thoughts exactly. I live in Germany, near the Dutch border. I work in The Netherlands so I cross that border every day. I cannot use my works mobile internet in Germany without expensive roaming, and using a German phone gives me the same problems in the Netherlands. There should not be a difference using t-mobile in the Netherlands or Germany, but somehow it does not work that way. So, there is no flat-fee internet rate anywhere in Europe that I can use. So, no IPhone/HTC or whatever for me. European telco’s still are stuck in the dark ages of technology and the European Parliament is doing enough to stop that. The Schengen treaty provides free passage of services, goods and people across all inner European borders, but make a phone call or use the net and Schengen seems not to apply! It is a big big shame.
Herman
I want an EU wide carrier as well. Telenor is another example of a carrier that has operations in more than one country, most notably Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Yet, as a Telenor Norway customer I don’t get any benefits out of this whatsoever. Why I have to pay ~ 5 times more to make a call from Sweden than from Norway is beyond me.
(It should be mentioned that they do have a premium service called “Call Scandinavia” that lowers the cost of calls to “just” ~ 3 times as much as a the price of a call within Norway, but it comes with a fixed monthly charge and applies to calls only, not texts or data.)
I would very much like to know more about why this is. When I first heard that Telenor had operations in Sweden and Denmark I immediately assumed that I would get the same prices there as I get in Norway, and I was surprised and disappointed to hear this was not the case.