Where it really kicks ass is when you are out of town and need to find a location or restaurant. This have been great when I am still in the same country but earlier this week I when to Glasgow/scotland and the first thing you get is a welcome SMS from one of the local mobile network operators and here is when the problem arise.

The problem is that the SMS is more of a warning than a welcome message or even a HAHA-turn-roaming-on-and-we-gone-make-you-cry-message.

My problem here is the data traffic. They charge you 40 SEK/MB and that is almost $5/MB. So Starting my facebook application or loading some maps in the iPhone would cost me loooots of money. If I use it all day it would be cheeper to hire a private guide all day and this really pisses me off. The phone operators makes so much money on dataroaming that they have no reasons at all to change it. As long as they all agree and charge the same price. In sweden this is not even legal.

As a reference to the price we charge our customers (list price) 15 SEK / GB and thats almost $2 for ONE GB. We are a really small operator and we pay for all our traffic. The big operators like Telia/Orange/O2 and the rest they do not pay for all they traffic and probably they only pay for a small part of the traffic.

And what makes me even more angry is that I think that the operators will lose money in the end. If the price where not a rip-off I would have spent a couple of hundreds just to have the luxury of a GPS and my emails. But during my stay I did not roam a single time.

I REALLY RELLY HATE GREED!!!

A picture says more than thousands of words so here you go!

Nice huh