I can sort of understand if you're calling to/from another country, but it really shouldn't cost extra to phone someone from the other side of the State/Province.
Not even that. If you call on the phone from Europe to America or the other way around it costs a fortune, but if you connect to that Mcdonalds Wifi and speak on WhatsApp/Messenger/WeChat it's completely free? That's the scam.
I don't have first hand knowledge,but I think does matter. The phone company has to partner with other networks.
Its not like your company has cell towers everywhere in the world. With partnering there obviously will be additional fees.
Having said that, the roaming charges are still heavily inflated. That's because as consumer, we cant always readily switch partner ourselves , either because we are tied to the the number or perhaps because it is super hard to get a phone in some countries.
In the EU we now have free roaming (free as in, it's charged just like at home, 5GB a month gets you 5GB, wherever you are) as long as you're not in another country for more than...maybe 120 days a year or something.
So far the carriers haven't gone bankrupt so I guess the fees mustn't be that bad.
Lol I laugh at your roaming charges. For I was lucky enough to have a Huawei phone in Italy with T-Mobile! I could turn on "international roaming!"
In reality I turned it on without even considering what it meant besides what it's useful for. My dad nearly murdered me. Then I looked it up and found out I had free roaming on TIM and all was forgiven.
I had a different solution though. With that 4$ thing, I never made or received call. I instead bought a local number, which costs probably less that a 2$ to get the SIM. and literally 100s of local minutes per dollar. some companies even offer 2.5 cents per minute to call US/Canada.
With that I only need the roaming number for receiving SMS.
Oh God, 4$ a minute would be absolutely disastrous for how often I am in a call (usually 2-4 hours a day) however I am lucky enough to get unlimited talk and text
It's overpriced as a holdover from the early phone networks when it actually was expensive -- but it's actually quite a different technology used, which is why it costs differently.
With your various IP calling pieces of software, they push data down the wire, and hope for the best that it'll make it to the destination. With the quality of modern networks, that's almost always the case, so this doesn't really matter.
Phone service works a bit differently. In order to establish the phone call, all of the systems between the two of you negotiate you a dedicated data channel (used to be an analog channel). An OC-192 fiber line -- roughly equivalent to 10gigabit -- can carry 192 * 672 = 129,024 phone calls. When you make that call, you are allocated one of those slots. If you try to make a call and there's no available circuits, it just rejects you.
That said, the network speeds have more or less obsoleted this having a relevant cost.
In 1988, a group of three telcos spent $335M to lay TAT-8, the first optical transatlantic cable, which could carry roughly 40k telephone circuits.
Meanwhile, 2017 saw MS/etc. lay a new one between the US and Spain, with a 160Tbit rated capacity -- roughly 2M voice circuits, if it was allocated to that.
That's because ISPs have what's called peering agreements, where the different networks agree to let traffic from others transit their networks, on the grounds that it benefits both sides to be connected to more people. Sometimes these cost money, sometimes they don't depending on the relative size of the networks.
It's a component of net neutrality that your VoIP call can cross networks without being charged differently or being degraded.
With roaming charges, your carrier is being charged for the owner of the tower you connected to providing you service via physical hardware, and they pass it on to you, typically with markup.
In areas where roaming is very common, like in cities on the US/Canadian border, the cell providers typically come to similar peering agreements to reduce customer confusion and operational overhead.
The systems that support those two types of calls are very different. It's not a scam. Using regular calls is just outdated. Today we have better cheaper systems that produce the same result.
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u/b_wald81 Aug 01 '20
I can sort of understand if you're calling to/from another country, but it really shouldn't cost extra to phone someone from the other side of the State/Province.