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Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn
by thom 3y ago
Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in some cases. But before we launched, the EU basically cracked down on the underlying charges and made roaming far less stressful for everybody. Shame, because we had quite a nice end to end setup that would test real world usage on many combinations of laptops and dongles and ensure everything triggered properly.
- netsharc 3y agoI suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout. EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't have free roaming... Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers should've seen it coming...
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoLiechtenstein, Norway, and Iceland are part of the EEA, where 95% of EU law still applies.
- thom 3y agoIt probably would still be useful - even quite recently a UK politician got into hot water running up a large bill on his work iPad, I’ll admit I’ve not followed the industry for the last decade as anything but a consumer, You also see the same dynamic with cloud costs where this certainly is active area for startups. Anywhere you can see massive bill shock, you have both sides of the market motivated to fix it, because the provider often ends up absorbing the costs when the customer complains.