<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by stimpy:
I wasn't referring to customer billing, rather the labor intensive settlement systems between operators. But the capital costs for the international roaming systems (which include IN) and interconnects are the bulk of it. Those are extra costs solely to support global roaming. And how many people roam between countries? A very small percentage of the total wireless users for a given operator. That's why we all have to pay a hefty bill when we roam. If more people roamed, the costs would go down. I don't think the charges are obscene when you add up all the numbers.</font>
Well, the EU doesn't agree with you, which is why they raided most operators last year and are under investigation for price fixing. Initial reports claim the EU will clamp down on the rediculous prices some operators charge. The entire clearinghouse system is pretty simple, it's all computers and at the end of a cycle a telco either receives money or gets a bill, that the operator decides to multiply that by 10 and pass it on to the customer is where IMHO they are making a massive mistake. But wireless operators are pretty much scumbags anyway, take Europe for example where my telco still charges me €0.14 per SMS message sent, a 160 character message...