stockton wrote:Lootman wrote:I don't know about you but personally I do not think it is the job of any politician to protect me from free-market capitalism, nor to bully or otherwise engineer artificially low pricing for anything.
Now there is a case for some level of pricing regulation if and only if one company has a monopoly. But in this case there is competition and it is trivially easy to switch from one carrier to another. It is not like the bad old days when it was BT or nothing. If all telco's start charging for roaming then a new entrant might enter the market with free roaming and clean up. That invisible hand thingy.
You have choices e.g. switch carrier, don't use roaming overseas, use wi-fi calling or whatsapp calling, buy a cheap local phone when overseas and so on. I do not think we need an ombudsmen for roaming.
I suspect that Lootman has a rather insular outlook on such matters. In reality the sheer hassle caused by roaming charges to anybody with an interest in their wallet was almost as important as the charges themselves. Imagine having to look carefully at your phone every time you used it in order to decide which country"s network you were connected to - and then having to enter into months of argument if you inadvertently used the phone without looking.
The ban on roaming charges could reasonably be looked upon as a punishment for failing to set up a system which dealt with the fact that countries have borders. (And the system has still not been set up properly.)
Lootman is wrong. There is no real competition in mobile telecoms, just as there was (and still is) no real competition in banking. Why? Because if there was competition with proper price transparency then one firm would wipe out all the others with low costs, or at least provoke a race to the bottom which would reduce profits all round. None of the big firms want that. Instead, they indulge in what is called "confusion marketing" whereby they pretend to compete but in reality bamboozle the customers with literally thousands of prices, contracts, deals, plans etc. which guarantee that that the big operators all get a profitable slice of the market as it is impossible for customers to work out which "offer" is actually cheapest, thus providing the glue for customer inertia. I recall a documentary on Radio 4 about 20 years ago in which a spokeswoman for the US firm AT&T explained that they had tried to enter the UK market and had had to
devise a computer programme to sort through the 20,000 deals on offer in the UK to work out which were the cheapest and best, and under which conditions. International call roaming adds no extra costs to the costs of international phone calls apart from a small increase in billing costs between telecoms forms. They like to give off the idea it is expensive, almost as if they had to employ banks of telephonists manually plugging calls into switchboards like in the 19505. But that is bogus. As the EU highlighted when banning roaming charges, the charges are simply an exercise in ambushing unsuspecting customers with ridiculously high charges, and then blaming them when they complained! You may recall that some roaming charges were incurred simply when you had your domestic mobile phone switched on abroad, even if you were not actively using it to make a call, download emails or browse the internet. It was robbery, and still is.