BBC News reports that “Some of Europe’s biggest mobile phone operators, including the UK’s Orange and Germany’s T-Mobile, have agreed to slash mobile phone roaming charges.”
No mention of cuts to the enormous and unsavoury charges for sending text messages abroad: it may be only a small segment of the overall texting volume but costs are sometimes upwards of ten times the domestic rate for sending 1K of data; are often not delivered between rival operators or are queued up with the lowest priority for transmission.
Nor any mention anywhere of the sometimes underhand way some operators discriminate against customers of non-partner operators: from an innocuous “number unobtainable” signal to poorer sevice: in most industries, it would be called running a cartel…
