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Roaming charges...

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paulnumbers
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423241

Postby paulnumbers » June 28th, 2021, 8:45 pm

AF62 wrote:
paulnumbers wrote:
AF62 wrote:
As previously explained, none of them are actually reasonable.


It's quite clear you don't actually want a solution, if you'd spent the time looking for one instead of this conversation, you'd have one. For a start, several UK providers don't charge!


They all do - EE, O2, and Vodafone. Nobody else offers esims for Apple watches.


There's an Iphone 6S on sale on ebay for £25. Grab that, and you can stick a sim in that and tether to it.

GrahamPlatt
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423242

Postby GrahamPlatt » June 28th, 2021, 8:56 pm

I’ve often wondered about these “dual sim” phones. If you have a decent UK plan in place, so can “phone home” with that, but you put a local sim In for data/local calls, does the phone automatically choose the appropriate sim for you, or do you need to deliberately switch between the two?

AF62
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423243

Postby AF62 » June 28th, 2021, 9:01 pm

paulnumbers wrote:
AF62 wrote:
paulnumbers wrote:
It's quite clear you don't actually want a solution, if you'd spent the time looking for one instead of this conversation, you'd have one. For a start, several UK providers don't charge!


They all do - EE, O2, and Vodafone. Nobody else offers esims for Apple watches.


There's an Iphone 6S on sale on ebay for £25. Grab that, and you can stick a sim in that and tether to it.


Frankly this is getting dull.

That doesn't solve the issue as the purpose of an esim in a watch, which is to use it without a phone.

And your 'solution' still requires buying a local sim (and you still haven't explained how to buy a Swedish sim in a Spanish airport) and it doesn't solve the problem of receiving calls made to the UK phone and it doesn't solve the problem of making calls back to the UK.

paulnumbers
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423244

Postby paulnumbers » June 28th, 2021, 9:16 pm

AF62 wrote:
paulnumbers wrote:
AF62 wrote:
They all do - EE, O2, and Vodafone. Nobody else offers esims for Apple watches.


There's an Iphone 6S on sale on ebay for £25. Grab that, and you can stick a sim in that and tether to it.


Frankly this is getting dull.

That doesn't solve the issue as the purpose of an esim in a watch, which is to use it without a phone.

And your 'solution' still requires buying a local sim (and you still haven't explained how to buy a Swedish sim in a Spanish airport) and it doesn't solve the problem of receiving calls made to the UK phone and it doesn't solve the problem of making calls back to the UK.


Ebay for the SIM

Leave an answerphone message on your UK number telling people to call the new number while you're away. Or they can use facetime, or whatsapp, or skype, or an email .............. or 10,000 other options

>Frankly this is getting dull.

I'm sure it is, when you're determined not to find a solution for your problems that any reasonable person would have licked in a few hours.

Woe is me.

servodude
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423285

Postby servodude » June 29th, 2021, 12:14 am

GrahamPlatt wrote:I’ve often wondered about these “dual sim” phones. If you have a decent UK plan in place, so can “phone home” with that, but you put a local sim In for data/local calls, does the phone automatically choose the appropriate sim for you, or do you need to deliberately switch between the two?


In android (well last time I tried) you can set up rules as to which is preferred for what use
- whether to use the other as a fall back (which includes whether or not to enable data for it)

works quite nicely
EDIT: iirc when you have two enabled and make a call it will ask which to use

- sd

AF62
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423337

Postby AF62 » June 29th, 2021, 8:59 am

paulnumbers wrote:
AF62 wrote:
paulnumbers wrote:
There's an Iphone 6S on sale on ebay for £25. Grab that, and you can stick a sim in that and tether to it.


Frankly this is getting dull.

That doesn't solve the issue as the purpose of an esim in a watch, which is to use it without a phone.

And your 'solution' still requires buying a local sim (and you still haven't explained how to buy a Swedish sim in a Spanish airport) and it doesn't solve the problem of receiving calls made to the UK phone and it doesn't solve the problem of making calls back to the UK.


Ebay for the SIM

Leave an answerphone message on your UK number telling people to call the new number while you're away. Or they can use facetime, or whatsapp, or skype, or an email .............. or 10,000 other options


So you are now suggesting people calling to now call an international number and incur significant cost - nice.

paulnumbers wrote:>Frankly this is getting dull.

I'm sure it is, when you're determined not to find a solution for your problems that any reasonable person would have licked in a few hours.

Woe is me.


There is no solution other than pay the telecom companies more money.

And all because the telcom companies are greedy gits and have decided to exploit the situation and increase the prices vastly beyond any increase in costs.

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423396

Postby Infrasonic » June 29th, 2021, 11:06 am

Dual SIM / Multi SIM/ eSIM.

There are different types of systems, dual standby, dual active et al. It's both a phone hardware and network dependent set up.

You are still dependent on your host domestic network playing ball. I checked on Three the other day after this thread started, they are now supporting eSIMS across several brands including Google Pixels - hurrah! But not my Pixel 3a (which has an eSIM) - boo! (Don't know why yet - currently investigating. Android 10 should have opened it up to all capable networks - I'm on 11).

This is the sort of thing one has to constantly deal with - spending ages researching technical topics trying to work out if there is a genuine technical reason a mobile network doesn't support some new liberating technology like multi or eSIM - or whether it is yet another tactic to stop people having choice to use more than one network on one phone without swapping SIM cards around (which you'd need an unlocked phone for anyway...).

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423404

Postby servodude » June 29th, 2021, 11:20 am

Infrasonic wrote:whether it is yet another tactic to stop people having choice to use more than one network on one phone without swapping SIM cards around


This ^
- at the point the SIM info is passed to the carrier from the phone or modem it's just a number in a standard format (traditionally an IMSI)
- whether that's "acceptable" to the network is a book keeping exercise - as they need to work out who to bill

consider that all networks will allow an emergency call in the absence of a SIM

Even old CDMA networks ( without SIMs) use the MEID number (the IMEI of the module without the checksum) simply as a biller lookup

-sd

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423469

Postby AF62 » June 29th, 2021, 3:02 pm

servodude wrote:consider that all networks will allow an emergency call in the absence of a SIM


Not in the UK they won't.

The phone may display 'emergency calls only' when there is no SIM but if dialled the phone won't connect. The facility to do that was turned off in 2009 after lots of hoax calls to the emergency services which they couldn't trace back because of the absence of a SIM, although at the same time the facility to 'roam' onto another UK network for the 999 call was introduced if your network didn't have coverage.

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423477

Postby BobbyD » June 29th, 2021, 3:24 pm

AF62 wrote:There is no solution other than pay the telecom companies more money.

And all because the telcom companies are greedy gits and have decided to exploit the situation and increase the prices vastly beyond any increase in costs.


It's not the telecom company's fault, they are doing what they are supposed to do and what it was patently obvious they were going to do. If you want to apportion blame look at the people who made it possible for them to do it.

Mobile phone contracts are an interesting example of multi-layered pricing. I've actually met people who pay the advertised network rate of £40 or £50 a month for a decent contract!

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423523

Postby servodude » June 29th, 2021, 5:09 pm

AF62 wrote:
servodude wrote:consider that all networks will allow an emergency call in the absence of a SIM


Not in the UK they won't.

The phone may display 'emergency calls only' when there is no SIM but if dialled the phone won't connect. The facility to do that was turned off in 2009 after lots of hoax calls to the emergency services which they couldn't trace back because of the absence of a SIM, although at the same time the facility to 'roam' onto another UK network for the 999 call was introduced if your network didn't have coverage.


ahhh that's shite
there's a special place in hell for anyone who hoax calls like that
- sd

Infrasonic
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423550

Postby Infrasonic » June 29th, 2021, 6:12 pm

servodude wrote:
AF62 wrote:
servodude wrote:consider that all networks will allow an emergency call in the absence of a SIM


Not in the UK they won't.

The phone may display 'emergency calls only' when there is no SIM but if dialled the phone won't connect. The facility to do that was turned off in 2009 after lots of hoax calls to the emergency services which they couldn't trace back because of the absence of a SIM, although at the same time the facility to 'roam' onto another UK network for the 999 call was introduced if your network didn't have coverage.


ahhh that's shite
there's a special place in hell for anyone who hoax calls like that
- sd


I remember being mortified years ago when I realised (looking at the logs) that my Nokia 9110 had pocket dialled 999 on multiple occasions - the only number button still active with the number/screen lock on. They should have made 9 less proud.

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423553

Postby servodude » June 29th, 2021, 6:15 pm

Infrasonic wrote:
servodude wrote:
AF62 wrote:
Not in the UK they won't.

The phone may display 'emergency calls only' when there is no SIM but if dialled the phone won't connect. The facility to do that was turned off in 2009 after lots of hoax calls to the emergency services which they couldn't trace back because of the absence of a SIM, although at the same time the facility to 'roam' onto another UK network for the 999 call was introduced if your network didn't have coverage.


ahhh that's shite
there's a special place in hell for anyone who hoax calls like that
- sd


I remember being mortified years ago when I realised (looking at the logs) that my Nokia 9110 had pocket dialled 999 on multiple occasions - the only number button still active with the number/screen lock on. They should have made 9 less proud.


Yeah that was a bit of an oversight in design
- and you can be forgiven for it ;) bum dialing isn't a hoax call

-sd

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423699

Postby BobbyD » June 30th, 2021, 12:07 pm

servodude wrote:
GrahamPlatt wrote:I’ve often wondered about these “dual sim” phones. If you have a decent UK plan in place, so can “phone home” with that, but you put a local sim In for data/local calls, does the phone automatically choose the appropriate sim for you, or do you need to deliberately switch between the two?


In android (well last time I tried) you can set up rules as to which is preferred for what use
- whether to use the other as a fall back (which includes whether or not to enable data for it)

works quite nicely
EDIT: iirc when you have two enabled and make a call it will ask which to use

- sd


Put a second sim in my phone for the first time while I'm waiting for my number to port. Asked to set the default sim, can separate default for calls and text, and then have the opportunity to change everytime I make a call or send a text, really well implemented.

stockton
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Re: Roaming charges...

#423745

Postby stockton » June 30th, 2021, 3:06 pm

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.)

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423751

Postby Avantegarde » June 30th, 2021, 3:36 pm

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.

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Re: Roaming charges...

#423757

Postby Lootman » June 30th, 2021, 3:44 pm

Avantegarde wrote:nternational 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.

As long as the roaming charges are accurately explained then there can be no reasonable complaint. If people are too lazy or stupid to read the small print then of course they will get inferior outcomes when compared to those who do read them.

In the example I gave earlier, incoming calls from the UK are charged at 2 quid a minute. So I have a choice, if receiving such a call, to either accept the call and pay that, or decline it and not pay that. Why is that so onerous?

In practice there are better and cheaper ways of handling such situations, as various people here have pointed out. Isn't the real problem here that people got used to something being artificially cheap or free? And now it is not they suddenly have to apply a little more thought and it is all too much for them?

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Re: Roaming charges...

#424143

Postby stockton » July 2nd, 2021, 9:34 am

Lootman wrote:As long as the roaming charges are accurately explained then there can be no reasonable complaint. If people are too lazy or stupid to read the small print then of course they will get inferior outcomes when compared to those who do read them.

If you can discover from the small print how to avoid roaming charges whilst near an international border but not roaming, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me.

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Re: Roaming charges...

#424145

Postby pje16 » July 2nd, 2021, 9:38 am

Agreeing to T&Cs is the biggest lie on the Internet
https://tosdr.org/
There are some interesting ones on here if you can be bothered to read them :lol:

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Re: Roaming charges...

#424147

Postby swill453 » July 2nd, 2021, 9:40 am

stockton wrote:
Lootman wrote:As long as the roaming charges are accurately explained then there can be no reasonable complaint. If people are too lazy or stupid to read the small print then of course they will get inferior outcomes when compared to those who do read them.

If you can discover from the small print how to avoid roaming charges whilst near an international border but not roaming, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me.

It's relatively easy if you're not roaming - just disable roaming on the phone.

There is a problem if you're roaming in one country, say Bulgaria, and get near the border with another country like Turkey where the charges are vastly higher.

Scott.


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