Nah, they understand. They common trend on this site and a few other techy sites I frequent is the same, something for nothing. If a megacorp is making money it can surely stand to not make so much.
The very reasons to maintain some form of roaming charges comes down to, who built the towers? Who invested in the hardware, software, and persons, working to provide the service? I do not care one wit about this claim "public resources" when it comes to cell phones? Why not? Because it is a patent excuse to take. The same excuse is used when people want specific speech censored from the airwaves but not another. However, hell and high water reign should the same taking be done to something techies hold near and dear to their hearts, you would never see them support taking of speech rights or such with regards to their blogs, sites, and whatnot.
Back to roaming charges. Should we not then force nation states to not charge access fees to their networks? Many do. They charge carriers for calls going into their state owned agencies.
Simply put, don't allow roaming charges and costs will be spread to anyone using a cell phone, whether they roam or not. You cannot legislate away costs, you certainly can profit, but I guess the private investor should have known better. Kind of like government bonds, they are only really guaranteed the day they are written
I can't be the only one thinking this is just a handout to the telecoms, and they will somehow find a loophole where they won't do anything for that money. We've done this before, and it hasn't worked out well.
> So ... the carriers still live. They didn't get what they deserved.
I don't see any way to make carriers "pay" until we have technology that can replace their massive capital investment (partially funded by taxpayers). The barriers to entry are extremely high.
The telcos have been fibbing about their coverage of rural areas. They do that to attract customers, but they also get subsidies for coverage. There is no independent verification of their claims. Yet another example of government not being competent when handing out money.
They're in the process of pulling out 3G in some rural areas I've been to. There's even less coverage than before.
This is a constantly repeated urban legend. The telcos never received anywhere near $300 billion in tax subsidies. It comes up constantly in threads like this, and the people claiming it can never back it up with actual data or proof of any sort, just vague statements.
Aren't we talking about fees for cell phone service here? It's a robust market with quite a few major competitors. What does paying off politicians have to do with anything?
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.
Governments are actually profiting the most from current situation by auctioning frequencies to Telco's.
Finland is the only country that uses the proceeds from these auctions to build one network from which all providers lease.
The rest of the countries milk the auctions as a cash-cow. The cool thing for countries is that they do not have to call this officially a tax on peoples income.
My comment certainly is wild speculation, but so is everything else about this topic out there. I think no one has proper sources to confirm or deny anything.
Right. So what can be done about telcos taking that money, and giving it to shareholders instead of delivering the infrastructure they committed to? Very little. That money is gone.
Did you read the article?
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