Re: Avoiding 3G roaming costs

[Paul Hardwick <paul peck org uk>]

Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
>   
> > We can hack something together with F11 perhaps, and on F12 it's even
> > easier.  You can try to enter your providers' MCC/MNC (a 6-digit number
> > for the US, 5 digits for everywhere else) in the connection editor in
> > the "Network" entry and NM will direct the modem to register *only* on
> > your providers network and thus not roam, but there are certainly
> > improvements we can do.
> >     
>
> The obvious improvement I can think of, assuming the 5/6 digits codes
> you mention are stored in the providers database, is to add a checkbox
> "allow roaming" to the edit connection page... do we have such codes?
> if not, where should I look for?
>
> By the way, thanks for replying, I thought mailman redirected the
> message to /dev/null ;)
>
>
>   
Ideally the user should be warned when the registration state of the 
device becomes set to roaming. Roaming is a big an issue where a user 
operates within their own country but close to the border of another 
country (In Europe this is a significant issue). In poor signals 
conditions the foreign network can be found before the local network and 
the user will be roaming without leaving his country. When users 
persistently operate in these regions the usual recommendation is to 
manually select the network to their home network.

When you are deliberately travelling abroad you may also need to select 
the Service Provider to use. While most Service Providers allow their 
systems to be used for voice and SMS the data connections will often 
fail if there is no agreement between them and your Service Provider. 
Some of the larger Service Provider groups  use SIMs that intelligently 
manage registration for you with lookup tables etc  to ensure that only 
partner networks are used if available. But that is not universal for 
all SIMs.

Just to add a little insight ... I have a UK Vodafone account.and I 
have noticed that when I roam from the UK to Belgium my Vodafone SIM 
will keep me connected to Proximus (the local Vodafone group member) if 
possible and when I query the registration state I am not roaming but it 
is a different MNC. But I am charged a higher tariff for data! If I 
travel to a location in Belgium where Proximus is not available then my 
phone will register with one of the other two networks. The tarifs are 
*much* higher and one of them cannot support 3G data at all and refuses 
to make the data connection.