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Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why roaming charges are so scandalous. Surely the telecoms know if they dropped their prices they would make a lot more money?

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Part of the problem is that country governments extracted a shitload of money out of the telcos. In Germany, the telcos paid a combined 96.000.000.000 € for the UMTS frequencies in 2000 (making 1200€ per citizen, assuming 80M citizens in Germany), and in 2010 another 3.600.000.000 €.

Now add the enormous capital requirement of first building a countrywide network of GSM BTS, then upgrade these to UMTS, then to LTE (and, of course, always having to upgrade the backhaul links) and you see why mobile phone operators try to squeeze any penny out of the customer's pocket they can.

'extracted' as in 'run an auction to let the market sort it out'.

It's popular to blame governments for everything, but if market actors behave irrationally, there's nobody to blame but them.

Indeed, people are always saying "let the market decide". We ran a market. It decided.

to the detriment of the citizens of Germany, as they pay more for less than just about anyone in the EU for mobile data.

considering the spectrum is a public resource, it's up to the government to make sure such a resource is adequately exploited for the good of the people. I think one could make a strong argument that extracting 1200EUR a head from telecom providers isn't the best way to exploit such a public resource.

The government had no idea what it's worth (and who did in 2002?), so they ran an auction. Should they have decided 'oh, that's too much, let's just charge half of that?'

They probably make a reasonable amount of roaming money from business or government travellers with company phones who don't care about getting billed €30/day on their short trip with expensive hotels and flights.

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