![]() International roaming is built on a shoddy patchwork of contracts, negotiated on a carrier-by-carrier basis, totally out of view. It's when you start looking at the business arrangements that things get truly inscrutable. In other words, while your voice never leaves your host country, because of the signal transmission, every call you make abroad from an American phone is an international call.įrom a technical perspective, making a call abroad is more complicated than making one at home, but not drastically so. The chart above outlines a similar scenario, with an Australian visitor in the UK, via. The voice signal travels straight from your new British carrier to your recipient's British carrier. The local carrier passes the signal transmission overseas to AT&T, which passes it back to your recipients British carrier, and then to his phone. Here's what happens then: Your phone transmits a signal transmission-location, length, destination-to the local carrier of your provider's choice. ![]() The call is connected, the carrier knows how much call time you've used, and you're charged according to your contract-the one you signed when you got your phone, or a special one you agreed to before travel.īut let's say you call your friend in London from your American phone, on, say, AT&T. Your phone will transmit a voice signal to your carrier, which is then routed to the recipient's carrier, and then to their phone. This signal is passed along to the recipient's phone as well, to identify the caller. If you're using a British-bought phone, this is what happens: Your phone will transmit a signal transmission to your carrier, which includes information about the phone, length of call, destination number and geographical location. Say you're in London, and you're meeting a friend for dinner. Only if you're overseas, that signal transmission travels a lot farther than the rest of the call. A call consists of two parts-the voice or data transmission, and then an accompanying signal transmission. Magic.īehind the scenes, things are a bit more complicated. Point is, it's very easy to use your phone in another country, and there's almost no functional compromise in doing so: the number is the same you can still send texts connecting to the web works just as it does at home. You may have had to notify your carrier of your trip overseas to get service, or maybe not. You may get a text message saying you're now on your carriers' foreign partner, or maybe not. So what is it? Price fixing? Excessive regulation? Actual expenses? Why on earth does it cost 20 times more to visit a webpage on your smartphone on one part of the planet's surface over another? The reasons are complicated, but don't abandon all hope - yet.īefore you deplane in a given country, there's a good chance that your cellphone will have found its way onto a native network.
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