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International data rates continue to be costly for no apparent reason
July 03, 2025
Recently, Bloomberg did an excellent story detailing the absurdity of international roaming rates in today’s marketplace. Even with wireless carriers offering unlimited calling and text messages at semi-reasonable rates within the United States borders, the carriers continue charging customers “by the minute for calls, fees for each text, and outrageous prices per megabyte.”
These ridiculously high prices are the reason that sites like this have written in the past about wireless customers running up a $750 international data roamingbill in one minuteorreceiving a $200,000bill after spending two weeks in Canada. In fact, as one report notes, Americans who go to Europe or Asia and use strictly hotel/cafe Wi-Fi will still get hit with almost $200 in data roaming charges.
So, why are these prices so high? Hasn’t 4G technology essentially removed major roaming issues around the world?Of course.But why would carriers change something that is netting them millions with little to no competition?
Considering we continue to seestoryafterstoryafterstoryof consumers being hit with high bills (sometimes ranging in the thousands of dollars), carriers will continue this pattern until they are forced to make changes legally.
Anyone remember how much wireless carriersHEAVILY resistedsending customers data or billing alert through text message even though other carriers around the world had been doing such basic consumer moves for years? Say, why did carriers agree to these text alerts?
That damn FCC strikes again with their heavy-handed government interference!
So, let’s review:
Not to worry though as Verizon has a perfectly good explanation for this insanity.
Which Verizon is doing by jacking up the price by 171,000%.
Instead, we are left with customers dealing with issues such as this:
Although T-Mobile was the first national carrier to announce that they were not charging for roaming around the world, this only applies to 2G data, which will not allow for anything other than basic e-mail and web-browsing.
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