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More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Unless you are dangerously close to a non-EU country and can't reliably prevent your phone from connecting to its networks
IMO they should have just made any roaming on non-EU-terms strictly opt-in. It’s madness that you can get billed ridiculous amounts of money just for being too close to a border or ship.
Originally it kinda made sense. Kinda hard to juggle through getting a deal with every single carrier everywhere
But it doesn't.
If you don't have a deal with the carrier, don't automatically connect to it. That is so dumb, (and it also smells illegal to some degree) cause in some cases it can happen on accident, and paying for things you specifically don't want is a really shakey basis in law.
shakes fist at Andorra
Never thought of that. Scary though.
This time last year I stayed on Bardsey Island, off the Welsh Coast. There's hardly any phone signal on the island, but they warned everyone to turn off roaming on their phones anyway. It turns out that because of the mountain on the island blocking the signal from the UK, lots of phones automatically connect to Irish providers, and cost more than people expect
It’s weird they wouldn’t work with a UK based telco to set up a relay station explicitly to prevent this.
Why prevent it, when you can just shrug your shoulders and rake in the money?
The telco likely doesnt make any extra from the roaming, they very likely pay it all out to the company the roaming took place on.
The island is tiny, and only has about half a dozen houses on it. The visitors are there because it's a nature reserve, so generally don't want to be on their phones anyway. It's not worth setting up a relay station over just telling everyone before they get there.
I've always been sent a text when I connect to the network of a different country. It happened immediately when I crossed over from France to Monaco, for example.
Or when O2 suddenly switches your (platin customer) plan to the less good plan which doesn't include 1 GB free roaming in world zone 2 (eg. Switzerland). So you just at some point get a message you used your ~60€ max capacity for background apps, for two persons plus the usual bill (45€) ≈ 180€. Then customer service tells you they'll change it back, and you'll not get charged for the used data - except they used an advanced technique there called LYING.