Let’s look at landmass - the US is equivalent in landmass to 16 Western OECD countries.
I haven’t seen roaming fees in the US for over 20 years. So you could travel 2500 miles and not once pay a roaming fee. Same with SMS - all messages have been included in my plan since at least 2005.
It’s hard to compare EU to US with something like roaming. Very few Americans travel outside the US regularly, so we’d need to look at something like hours outside home area per year, or something, to be any kind of useful - and there’s zero roaming within the US.
uzay@infosec.pub 7 months ago
Unless you are dangerously close to a non-EU country and can’t reliably prevent your phone from connecting to its networks
lemmylommy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Originally it kinda made sense. Kinda hard to juggle through getting a deal with every single carrier everywhere
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
themadcodger@kbin.earth 7 months ago
shakes fist at Andorra
mundane@feddit.nu 7 months ago
Never thought of that. Scary though.
Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
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
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
It’s weird they wouldn’t work with a UK based telco to set up a relay station explicitly to prevent this.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Why prevent it, when you can just shrug your shoulders and rake in the money?
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
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.