Comment on More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

mundane@feddit.nu ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• 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

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  • 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.

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    • 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

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      • 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.

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  • themadcodger@kbin.earth ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    shakes fist at Andorra

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  • mundane@feddit.nu ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Never thought of that. Scary though.

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  • 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

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    • 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.

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      • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Why prevent it, when you can just shrug your shoulders and rake in the money?

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  • 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.

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• BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Frozengyro@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also, you can go to Alaska/Hawaii and not pay roaming. Some plans include Mexico and Canada as well.

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  • guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I find it hilarious when Europeans make all the jokes about Americans not traveling abroad when traveling through several countries for them is just driving from Miami to Disney World for us.

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    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      the travel distance is not the point in that criticism.

      the “having to actually interact with different cultures” is the point. You can experience pretty much all climate and vacation hotspots without leaving the US. Which is cool an all. But that way people from the US are never really forced to interact with cultures that are not the US. Which is the reason for the “uncultured US tourists are never traveling abroad” stereotype

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      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I do want to stipulate, that the US is full of different cultures. I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t have tons of shared culture here, but I feel its a disservice to ignore how many different cultures make the US

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    • GiddyGap@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Although the EU has some similarities to the US at the federal level, every country is its own sovereign nation with distinct rules and regulations, pricing, culture, language, cell phone providers, etc. It’s very different than traveling between states in the US.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yup. My wife went to Canada for a few days, so I bought a roaming plan. $20 and we were set. Yeah, that kinda sucks, but I’ve only needed to do that once.

    If we go on a long trip somewhere, we’ll probably get a SIM, but it just doesn’t come up often.

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• wjrii@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m always cautious about comparing the US to the EU too closely, but in this case it fits, as both are continent-wide common markets. If you “live and travel within the EU,” it barely counts as international travel for economic concerns.

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  • n2burns@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m always cautious about comparing the US to the EU too closely, but in this case it fits, as both are continent-wide common markets.

    The rest of North America would like a word with you…

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    • wjrii@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No more so than Switzerland and the former USSR west of the Urals, I suppose.

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      • n2burns@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        AFAIK, most of the pan-European plans cover the whole Schengen Area (including Switzerland), and the most of the former USSR boarders aren’t all that porous, unlike the NAFTA boarders.

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• Beryl@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Beware of Swizerland

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