<story><title>The SIM-less Phone Is Coming. And It Should Scare The Shit Out Of You</title><url>http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2012/05/the-sim-less-phone-is-coming-and-it-should-scare-the-shit-out-of-you/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>st3fan</author><text>I look forward to the moment when I can buy a world-wide subscription from Apple as an MNVO that just works all over the globe without the almost criminal roaming rates and hassles that we currently have.&lt;p&gt;Earlier this year I was on a trip to Europe and accidentally turned on my iPhone in Paris. It automatically checked my email and I probably reloaded my twitter stream. It was just 700 KB but I was charged a good $25 for that. That roaming rate translates to roughly 35000 CAD/GB.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;THIRTY-FIVE-THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR ONE GIG OF DATA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Someone please end this madness. Please let this be Apple.</text></item><item><author>stephengillie</author><text>In short, Apple is becoming an MNVO. With Mobile Network Virtual Operators, you don&apos;t know which carrier your connection is actually going over.&lt;p&gt;Apple is signaling to the rest of us that the &quot;dumb pipe&quot; future which carriers are facing is quickly approaching.&lt;p&gt;None of us will care who provides the future 4G/5G/6G connection; we&apos;ll just go with the cheapest carrier at the time. Apple here is just streamlining this process so their customers won&apos;t have to waste their time and money figuring it out, and they probably won&apos;t be alone in offering this type of service to the public.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Edit: The article makes a big deal about not being able to remove the SIM card from your phone. CDMA phones have never had SIM cards - to switch phones with Verizon or Sprint, you have to update which MEID or IMEI (number from the phone) is attached to your account. For many years, we were locked into brand-only phones because they were the only ones in the &quot;allowed&quot; database.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kamechan</author><text>In my experience, Apple actually made this process of &quot;global roaming&quot; worse, not better.&lt;p&gt;Case in point: I spend about 2 months a year in Japan and a month in London. I live in the US and have a plan through ATT. I used to have an iPhone 3gs, and then a 4 (now a Galaxy Nexus).&lt;p&gt;The first time I travelled to London with my iPhone, I knew enough to be paranoid about overages and activated my global roaming service and bought 25MB of data coverage just so I could use it in a pinch. ATT customers were supposed to be able to get free WiFi at Starbucks. That turned out to be false. Fortunately, almost every pub in London has free wifi and I tend to spend more time in pubs than Starbucks anyway.&lt;p&gt;The second or third day I was there I called ATT to try to get them to give me the unlock code so I could swap my US SIM out for one from O2. After about 30 minutes on the phone, I finally got someone who put it plainly, &quot;Sir, if you had any other phone besides the iPhone, we&apos;d be glad to let you unlock your phone so you could use the SIM from the local carrier. But we are under strict orders from Apple not to.&quot; I bought a 20£ throwaway Nokia the next day which had a free 30£ top-up with it and used it for the duration of the trip.&lt;p&gt;I have had similar experiences in Japan, except I have always had a Japanese phone (because I use the NFC-based Suica card for the Metro and in convenience stores). A couple years ago, I needed to be on-call whilst in Tokyo and wanted to be able to answer my iPhone if it rang. Long story short, my iPhone didn&apos;t even work in Tokyo ... regardless that the global roaming was turned on (and I was paying for it).&lt;p&gt;Was in Tokyo from Nov-Jan this last year. Brought my [unlocked] Galaxy S2 I had at the time. Went to Softbank with my wife, and went through the normal procedure of proving citizenship (hers, not mine) etc. to get Japanese rate plans. Also had brought my Japanese phone. SIM swapped into my GS2, worked perfectly. No more global roaming/iPhone drama. Had tried to do similar with iPhone previously, carriers in Tokyo wouldn&apos;t touch it. Same thing, &quot;Under strict orders from Apple not to …&quot;&lt;p&gt;Went back with my Nexus recently. Put SIM from GS2 into Nexus. Worked flawlessly, as unlocked phones have been doing forever. I do not yearn for an Apple-controlled MNVO. a) I like specifically choosing whatever carrier works best for my needs at the time (via a SIM card) b) my experiences roaming with iPhone so far have been much MORE expensive than with any other phone.&lt;p&gt;Edit: wanted to make it clear that the &quot;unlocked&quot; GS2 was an ATT GS2 which ATT voluntarily gave me the unlock code for when I called and told them I would be travelling with it.</text></comment>
<story><title>The SIM-less Phone Is Coming. And It Should Scare The Shit Out Of You</title><url>http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2012/05/the-sim-less-phone-is-coming-and-it-should-scare-the-shit-out-of-you/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>st3fan</author><text>I look forward to the moment when I can buy a world-wide subscription from Apple as an MNVO that just works all over the globe without the almost criminal roaming rates and hassles that we currently have.&lt;p&gt;Earlier this year I was on a trip to Europe and accidentally turned on my iPhone in Paris. It automatically checked my email and I probably reloaded my twitter stream. It was just 700 KB but I was charged a good $25 for that. That roaming rate translates to roughly 35000 CAD/GB.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;THIRTY-FIVE-THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR ONE GIG OF DATA&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Someone please end this madness. Please let this be Apple.</text></item><item><author>stephengillie</author><text>In short, Apple is becoming an MNVO. With Mobile Network Virtual Operators, you don&apos;t know which carrier your connection is actually going over.&lt;p&gt;Apple is signaling to the rest of us that the &quot;dumb pipe&quot; future which carriers are facing is quickly approaching.&lt;p&gt;None of us will care who provides the future 4G/5G/6G connection; we&apos;ll just go with the cheapest carrier at the time. Apple here is just streamlining this process so their customers won&apos;t have to waste their time and money figuring it out, and they probably won&apos;t be alone in offering this type of service to the public.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Edit: The article makes a big deal about not being able to remove the SIM card from your phone. CDMA phones have never had SIM cards - to switch phones with Verizon or Sprint, you have to update which MEID or IMEI (number from the phone) is attached to your account. For many years, we were locked into brand-only phones because they were the only ones in the &quot;allowed&quot; database.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmjordan</author><text>You might want to disable the data roaming setting in the &quot;Cellular Data&quot; section of the phone&apos;s Settings. It actually defaults to off in my experience, but maybe some SIM-locked ones have it enabled by the carrier by default?&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I agree, the typical data roaming charges are ridiculous. I don&apos;t see why they should be more than, say, twice your home rate (as there are 2 companies involved). Many of the mobile networks are giant multinationals anyway - the fact that roaming in, say, Vodafone.de&apos;s network as a Vodafone.co.uk customer, costs a made-up amount of money is just ridiculous. Hutchison 3G (&apos;3&apos;) actually have a system called &apos;3LikeHome&apos; in some countries, which let you roam in foreign &apos;3&apos; networks for the same price as your home network - this only includes calls and texts to other 3 numbers, but also, crucially, data. It&apos;s great, but there aren&apos;t many countries covered by it. And I can only assume it&apos;s not driving enough customers away from other operators to affect their bottom lines. But then most people don&apos;t seem to choose their phone tariffs rationally anyway. (OMG! A free phone! Only €50 a month! [NB: minimum contract 2 years])&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m just fearful that taking the SIM card out of the equation will leave us in a &lt;i&gt;worse&lt;/i&gt; position, where we can&apos;t even work around the problem by buying prepaid SIM cards when abroad.</text></comment>