AT&T Again Hints at a European Wireless Expansion

Maybe they'll offer free* wireless roaming in Europe?

*For a small fee*

While the media often parrots that the European mobile service costs is less expensive than the United States, this ignores the fact that while Americans can travel coast-to-coast without any roaming or long distance charges, as well as having incoming calls covered as part of their wireless plan, in Europe with its balkanized nationalities and wireless coverage areas consumers are hit with huge roaming fees -- voice and date -- as soon as they leave their home market, which can be quite small. And when they call wireless phone numbers they are billed excessive per-minute fees for that privilege.

That has been changing recently with EU rules being enforced reducing roaming costs. And new proposed regulations are even stiffer.

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eu ··· ulations

»ec.europa.eu/news/scienc ··· 6_en.htm

As it currently stands roaming is pretty bad in Europe. The proposed changes are still being fought by the carriers. The fact that when you travel within Europe you start paying roaming fees altogether stands in huge contrast to the United States. It would be akin to consumers in America needing to pay roaming fees if they traveled out-of-state, i.e. roaming fees for New York customers travelling to New Jersey or Illinois.

Inaccurate. The EU is a union, not a country. And a somewhat loose union, at that. Roaming across country lines in Europe would be closer to roaming into Canada or Mexico from the U.S.

Jim

I completely understand that politically speaking the European countries are completely different nations. But the reality is that Europe is mostly constituted by a hodgepodge of small balkanized countries. And travelling between EU countries is almost as common as travelling between U.S. States. So as a practical matter Europeans are in the position of having to pay roaming fees during common, often everyday, travel.

Europe is like if the U.S. broke-up into 50 different countries and suddenly there were roaming fees when going from one State (i.e. country) to another State.

The thing that calls itself "at&t" is willing to Borg some European wireless companies if European governments are willing to subject their people to the same low-performing, high-cost wireless and broadband offerings with which we're "graced" here in the U.S.? What a deal!

Let me tell you: I have family, friends and colleagues all over the planet. They are all, without exception, utterly astonished at how much Americans pay, and how little we get for it, for telephone service, broadband, subscription TV and wireless.

Europe: The worst thing you could ever possibly do is allow the thing that calls itself "at&t" into your place. Don't do it. Don't even consider it.

Jim

Why is that? AT&T would be subject to the same EU regulatory environment(which is much stronger than US) as every other EU telecom. They would play by the same rules and have to compete against many other companies on price.

Read what they said: They only want to bless the Europeans with their rip off if the regulatory environment over there is loosened. Stephenson must be on crack or something.

They should't do it. I passed on the iphone a couple time when it was only on AT&T (I'm on sprint)

So AT&T is a big player in the spying, they have agreements with EU carriers, those agreements might not get renewed now or the price might just jump towards the sky, some of those EU carriers might even being auditing their infrastructure and employees.. This all means AT&T has to push harder to acquire a EU carrier to maintain both the public side of revenue and the secret government side of revenue.

This won't be a success publicly but it will likely happen, they'll get their foot in the door, they'll whine about regulations in the EU to keep people distracted, get their key people entrenched into the industry their and maintain a presence while appearing to perform poorly while being subsidized by governments under laws to protect that relationship from public eyes.

Maybe AT&T is revealing the great miserable failure not acquiring T-Mobile has been. Not only did they lose all the money they had to fork over along with the bandwith but the biggest mistake of the failed acquisition is they helped to make T-Mobile a true Global brand in a Global economy. Why do you think Softbank bought Sprint? Look at the plan T-Mobile just revealed. Worldwide unlimited data, no roaming... Wow..
T-Mobile has a strong, healthy presence in Europe and is rapidly expanding here in the USA. AT&T and Verizon cannot compete anymore for all the business clients who travel to Europe. The Verizon acquisition of their stake from Vodafone was a huge mistake. They should have merged. They now become a "regional" player only just like their friends AT&T. Verizon and AT&T are now big fish in a small pond. The growth possibilities for T-Mobile and Softbank now make the US brands, the big 2 look like small regional players. It's a Global economy. The big 2 US players lost. AT&T knows it and they are starting to wake up. Verizon will reach their peak soon because they can no longer expand within the US, they stock price will become stagnant and shareholders are what kills companies. The lust for profit. Cut staff, cut service, cut amenities, raise prices, add on fees. Ultimately service goes down, you start to lose customers, you become a second rate brand. Happens all the time... Wait until a competitor comes along to challenge the duolopy's. It eventually will.......

That won't happen until one of the players has the spectrum to do something on AT&T and Verizon's rural turf. T-Mobile is not a challenger, if you get out of NYC and anywhere in the NE with a T-Mobile smartphone, you'll see pretty quickly.

You forgot about the other thing that could really happen, which is AT&T merges with T-Mobile altogether and sells off the US operations of T-Mobile to SoftBank.

My God... Musical mobile carrier chairs

That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Jim

Wonder what you smoked tonight....

Look at what SoftBank did in buying out the distant 4th place mobile operator in Japan after they bought out the third. Then tell me what I'm smoking. A merger of the two (T-Mobile and Sprint) could very well happen here in the US.

You make a very valid point. What people aren't looking at about the foreign mergers is exactly what will happen. DT and Softbank are big money players in this strange chess game. Sprint and T-Mo have quite a bit of unused spectrum here that they can light up. Both have access to well built networks in frequently visited countries for no charge. It looks like the long term winners are gonna be the underdogs after all.

Double post.