It's been 5-10 years behind in terms of technology for years.
I simply could not believe the first time I went over, and people were talking about their pagers. (In the UK, pagers died out in the 80s).
As a side question, what is the current roaming situation in Europe? The last time I had a European phone (a number of years ago), it was very frustrating to have to pay very high roaming fees as I was traveling in different countries. I think I had gone with Vodafone, which at the time seemed to have the best prices and the largest network. Coming from the US, where almost any plan allows you to call coast to coast with no extra fees, it was frustrating taking a train for a couple hours and then having to pay 1.50 euro/min or similar.
The EU put the bosh on it. Roaming within the EU is much cheaper with a pan EU contract. There is a surcharge if you don't have one but it's not as bad as before. There's no rules on data though so people get screwed that way.
> There's no rules on data though so people get screwed that way.
To the max.
€7/MB when roaming is pretty average in western Europe. I havn't seen a pan-Europe flat-rate dataplan. That's not even the worst part, it that there's a minimum 50kb charge pr. connection. Ick.
Interesting thing is, they route the data via my "home" network, instead of just dumping it on the nearest internet connection.
Interesting, I was worried about that the last time I was in Europe (Sept. 2008). When I got my bill from my American provider, I had no extra charges for data. It looks like, for now things might work better as a non-European phone user in the Europe, as far as data goes. I'll see what happens on my next trip this spring.
