Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU We didn't see this on the side of a bus. Five years to the day that Britain heard the results of the Brexit referendum, O2 has caved as the last of the UK's Big Four networks to re-introduce roaming charges in Europe for its customers. For its pay monthly punters, each gigabyte of data over 25GB will now be charged at £3.50 …
Even if it is on the side of a bus, people will mis-remember/mis-quote what it said and bend the words to suit whatever they want in order to further their own argument.
They won't appreciate that furthering your own argument by putting forward falsehoods is exactly what they're accusing other people of doing.
OK, I'll bite.
What the bus said: "We send the EU £350 million a week" and "let's fund our NHS instead"
What people claim it said: "let's give the NHS an extra £350M/week"
Note that the bus didn't say how much of that £350 million to give to the NHS. Yet people are still claiming that it did (and downvoting a perfectly rational, factual, neutral post)
"Let's give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week."
With your man stood in front of it.
there's no bus, there never was. Those pix are fake anyway, and even if they are, they do not portray what they do. I do find it ironic, that those voting for brexit will pay more to waddle along in Europe, left hand on their mobile, right hand on their mobile, posting on the sun comments page about this shameful! behaviour!
" I just don't like bullshit" Do you know what hypocrisy is? The clear intent of the wording was that the money would go to the NHS and that is what the majority of people believed it meant, i.e. native, English speaking voters. and that was the intention of those responsible.
Sorry if the truth offends you, which is most obviously does.
If £350m/week is outrageous, so is £250m/week.
It's chickenfeed in terms of overall pre-covid public spending of around £3B/week. Or the taxpayer money that's been spunked up againt the wall on HS2, Track&Trace, Crossrail, dodgy PPE, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear power statons we don't need, aircraft carriers with no aircraft, a prison system that doesn't work, handouts to NI/Wales/Scotland, etc, etc. Not to mention the now crippling national debt which our grandchildren will still be paying.
That is irrelevant.
If you think that the £350m/week figure on the bus convinced people to vote leave, then you surely think that they would also have voted leave if it had said £250m/week.
Am I wrong?
Given that the ONS said the figure is fine, this seems very much like sour grapes to me.
Although if you're going to lie about the PPE deals being dodgy, I'm sure you'll find a way to claim that "a lie on a bus won the referendum", despite logic proving otherwise.
"If you think that the £350m/week figure on the bus convinced people to vote leave". If you think it had no influence then you have problems. It was part of a concerted, extremely well campaign with lots and lots of free exposure in the Mail. Express, Telegraph etc., i.e. the media Brexiteers read and trust.
have been relentless in peddling the line that immigration is at the heart of the UK’s problems. They also gave the impression that all EU immigrants live off benefits and are a drain on the economy. Few point out that the majority of European immigrants have jobs and pay taxes.
Everyone is free to pick the heavily biased media they feel most comfortably supports there pre existing views*.
I would guess that the Venn intersection of Torygraf & Gruniad readers is a very small group.
*and as the last US election shows, that's not a good thing.
It's chickenfeed in terms of overall pre-covid public spending of around £3B/week.
Oops! I got my sums wrong. Before covid, UK public spending was around £800B/year. In round figures that's roughly £2B a day. £300M/week works around £40M per day. That's ~2% of overall government spending.
I think you were confused with the NHS pre covid spend which was between 2 and 3 £Bn/wk. The total welfare* spend across the UK would indeed make an additional £300M/wk disappear with no visible change.
*NHS, Social Services, Benefits & Education account for most of the £2Bn/day.
Actually it's quite a lot of money for me too, but we got good value for it, namely the 40% or whatever of European export earnings that we seem to have, er, mislaid somewhere this year. What a great bonus for the Brexit liars that this can be conveniently blamed on COVID-19.
The message (on the bus) was carefully worded to imply that the £350m would go to the NHS instead of the EU without actually saying anything of the sort.
And it was done so that the lying cunts who were repeating that particular piece of propaganda could later weasel their way out of actually doing anything by pointing out that that's not what the message said.
The message on the side of the bus was a trap.
The message on the side of the bus was carefully worded to encourage the remain campaign to talk about it /complain about it, and in doing so make the leave campaign's point that the UK was a net contributor to the EU (i.e. that the UK sent the EU lots of money).
Had the bus said £280 million (Gross contribution less rebate = what the UK actually sent to the EU), the bus would have faded from peoples' minds in a few days.
Instead, the remain campaign (helpfully, from the leave campaign's point of view) reminded everyone day in and day out that the UK sent the EU lots of money.
I wonder how many people that complain about the bus actually saw one, in real life (and also, which version: there were in fact at least two variants of the message). And yet, thanks to the remain campaign / remain supporters, we all know about the bus and can visualise it and are quite sure we saw loads of them.
".....and in doing so make the leave campaign's point that the UK was a net contributor to the EU".
Does that mean that there was Brits living in the happy world were Britain, the fifth richest ....and ... and ...second in the EU only to Germany, was paid by all other EU members for their pleasure and glory of having Britain as a member.
Amazing and probably true, like also that some seem to believe Britain was the only net contributor to the EU.
Some countries have been net contributors from the very start, Britain not so.
Guess what though... The NHS is *still* not funded more (regardless of the £350 million a week we supposedly save). Currently this festering mess of a Tory/UKIP fantasy is costing £440 million a week in lost growth, lost business, increased red tape, lost fishing and seafood industry... just to name a few.
This was pointed out before and after the referendum, the charlatans who continued with their lies continue to sit in government and smirk at the mess they created, and every time something else happens and Leave-voters bleat about 'oh, we didn't see that coming', those who voted Remain go 'but we did! And we warned you! And we begged you not to vote Leave! Because we knew this would be coming down the road'.
It is not a case of 'neener-neener-told you so-told you so' but rather an exasperated 'why did you not listen? Because some posh Tory said everything would be fine? Because that "man of the people" Farage said that only the metropolitan elite would be voting Remain and wouldn't you like to stick it to them?'
Yeah, let's just not go there. I see these stories time and again, and I am just so shocked that people continued down the road to 'stick it to the EU' while all the while it was more a case of gouging your ears and eyes out.
@anothercynic
"The NHS is *still* not funded more (regardless of the £350 million a week we supposedly save)"
The certainly not brexit supporting 'fullfact.org' doesnt agree- https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-england-394-million-more/
Looks like the NHS is continually increasing even if its not the £350 million figure. Apparently the aim is to now hit that figure in 2023/24. Not that I trust any of these buggers about it but then both official campaigns were full of bull.
"Currently this festering mess of a Tory/UKIP fantasy is costing £440 million a week in lost growth, lost business, increased red tape, lost fishing and seafood industry... just to name a few."
Where do you get that? Not disputing the figure I just wonder if its the correctly calculated one the UK is using or the bull number used in other countries. The UK economy was shown to take a huge hit because we correctly calculated the value of public services to be zero when they were doing nothing even though we were paying for them. But then the lockdown has been very expensive. Good job we got out of the EU or the economy would be much worse.
"It is not a case of 'neener-neener-told you so-told you so' but rather an exasperated 'why did you not listen?"
I am finding myself in the situation of having to ask some remainers how they can keep their delusions. Now that we are out we can see a clear divergence (similar to the financial crisis) where the EU is stuck and the UK like the rest of the developed world deals with the issue and moves on. The corona crisis seems to have woken up some remainers though. the vociferous defence of the EU regardless of its self inflicted harm has died down a lot recently. Maybe its because unlike the Euro-crisis this one hits here as well as over there and its hard to accuse our gov of negligence without comparing with the utter shambles of the EU response.
It has taken a while for a good cry baby article against brexit. The last was something to do with a harddrive from the Netherlands.
The certainly not brexit supporting 'fullfact.org' doesnt agree- https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-england-394-million-more/I would suggest you read FullFact's statement more carefully. Their statement was made in 2018 for starters. They also point out the following:
There is no guaranteed extra money to pay for increased NHS funding from stopping our payments to the EU budget. Other costs associated with Brexit are expected to outweigh the savings.Correlation is not causation.
Where do you get that? Not disputing the figure I just wonder if its the correctly calculated one the UK is using or the bull number used in other countries.None other than the Bank of England has published that figure. Can't get any better than that.
As for the vaccine fiasco, there are plenty of Remainers who have pointed at that (and the EU threatening AstraZeneca etc al) as being a spectacular own goal on the side of the EU. The defence is still there, but given how the COVID pandemic has dominated headlines for the better part of 15 months, it's only natural that one might think that they've all gone quiet. They're all looking at the seafood industry (the ones Johnson claimed to be saving with his super-special-last-minute-down-the-back-of-a-napkin deal), GB-NI import/export (and even UK-EU import/export), the godawful amount of paperwork (I know of several car manufacturers in this country who are, despite their size, struggling with it, and if *they* struggle, what chance has a small business got?) and pointing out that this was all foreseen, yet Brexiteer-in-chief David Frost was happy to just condemn God only knows how many small and medium businesses to extinction because he didn't really care as long as he got the hardest Brexit him and his paymasters from the Tory backbenches wanted.
The government has spectacularly failed the country in that it locked down too late, then when faced with a wave last year again locked down too late and misled people into making plans, only to have to tell them to cancel everything. Then, this year when faced with a wave from the Indian subcontinent, the government again refused to lock down because they wanted a deal with India, leading to an upsurge in the delta variant.
The only thing they *have* managed to do right is the vaccine rollout, and that was only thanks to leaving it to someone who had experience with procurement and logistics and then leveraging the local NHS infrastructures. The other thing they sort-of got right was furlough, but it left a *lot* of people in the self-employment sector out, leading to a lot of suicides.
But there we are. We've made our beds. We've to lie in them. It's just a shame that those business people who now bleat on about how voting Leave was a mistake categorically dismissed the warnings from experts in economy and politics because 'they knew better than experts'.
@anothercynic
"I would suggest you read FullFact's statement more carefully. Their statement was made in 2018 for starters"
If you would like to find a more up to date one that agrees with you feel free but it was only to point out the NHS is funded more as it usually is.
"Correlation is not causation."
As I agreed its not the same figure and I am oddly amused that they keep trying to find some way of putting that money into the NHS (Hammond planned for it and now they are making plans for 2024).
"None other than the Bank of England has published that figure. Can't get any better than that."
Cool so it should be the one that makes the UK look like we took a bigger hit than if we measured the same way as other countries. Which also means from opening up we should get a bigger jump in growth as the public services get counted as productive again. This is what happens when we lock down an economy from a pandemic. How much will be due to brexit is kinda hard to measure (there will be some change). Covid has been the most damaging as we can see globally, and being out of the EU has been good for the UK in that respect.
"David Frost was happy to just condemn God only knows how many small and medium businesses to extinction because he didn't really care as long as he got the hardest Brexit him and his paymasters from the Tory backbenches wanted."
Maybe there is fair reason for that? We voted brexit with leaving the EU appearing to be the goal and so his negotiations being to actually leave being the objective. And the hit on the few small/medium businesses dealing with the EU vs the majority who dont was the idea for some leave voters.
"The government has spectacularly failed the country in that it locked down too late"
I will be interested to see the autopsy of covid response. I expect lockdowns have caused more harm than good. Especially the indiscriminate lockdowns every time someone sneezes. Hell the UK is pretty much vaccinated and long since vaccinated the vulnerable so locking down should be at the back of anyones mind.
"But there we are. We've made our beds. We've to lie in them. It's just a shame that those business people who now bleat on about how voting Leave was a mistake categorically dismissed the warnings from experts in economy and politics because 'they knew better than experts'."
The comment on experts was at the time of extreme bull from the 'experts'. It was so bad that the 'expert' claims were being shot regularly for being the lie that it was. And both official campaigns did it, it was embarrassing. I thought the leave campaign was a set up to help remain win until I saw the standard of the remain campaign. Both were shocking.
>>> And the hit on the few small/medium businesses dealing with the EU vs the majority who dont was the idea for some leave voters.
>300,000 businesses. According to Leave.EU and based on HMRC VAT data. Which is an underestimation at best. SMEs condemned to the wall by dogma-blinded Brexit hardliners. Who were all too eager to pull the trigger on a pathetic, no-idea, no-clue Brexit "plan". (So long as their lobby and special interests survive. And cheered on by simpletons who just laugh it off as they parrot opinions they half read, hear or see on conservative media.)
@anothercynic
It dawns on me that I have been working on the assumption of something being obvious in my discussions with remainers that may not be so. Something I assumed everyone could see in my various discussions on the EU after brexit.
"pointing out that this was all foreseen" and "As for the vaccine fiasco, there are plenty of Remainers who have pointed at that (and the EU threatening AstraZeneca etc al) as being a spectacular own goal on the side of the EU."
The EU have reacted to the pandemic/vaccine procurement in the same way the EU deals with things normally and exactly as leavers accuse the EU of behaving.
>They tried to use the situation as a sovereignty grab (and still are).
>Trying to force 'ever closer union' and 'punish' members who 'misbehave'.
>Tried to dictate to the members how to behave.
>Such cooperation fell apart when members put their own country ahead of the EU (the right thing to do btw).
>Tried to blame anyone else but themselves for their own actions.
>Used threat of force against private entities (blocked export, raids).
>Even forgot about the all important 'no hard border' in Ireland they just negotiated!
Basically they were the power mad, uncoordinated, selfish children leavers accuse them of being. I still think they took AZ to court because the EU accused them of so much bull that the obvious (and hopefully loud) question was why not take them to court? And of course the EU lost.
The covid situation has been a great demonstration of what the EU is and why some people felt it worth voting leave.
Next you'll be telling me the current PM had nothing to do with the big red bus he was standing in front of or the message written down the side of it five years ago, and the vehicle was in fact some Christine-like possessed coach stalking him and photobombing press events.
Assuming they're liars economical with the truth is a healthy starting point for dealing with politicians, you can simply ignore 99% of what they say1 or promise2. For those that actually do wield the power we give them, pay very close attention3 to what they're actually doing with it.
1 I was quoted out of context (you were supposed to forget!)
2 That goal is/was an aspiration (ditto ^)
3 This may involve actually reading the implementation documents and waiting a while to see the outcome.
>>Boris got sacked three times for lying.
But that was Blair's/Brown's/Corbyn's fault. (That's how the apologists/whataboutery-fans excuse their idol don't they?) Like Trump et al, he could be caught with his todger in their family dog and they'd still support/vote-for/make-excuses-for him.
I'll just leave this here:
"Under normal circumstances I'd say I told you so. But, as I have told you so with such vehemence and frequency already the phrase has lost all meaning. Therefore, I will be replacing it with the phrase, I have informed you thusly"
<<If there's enough demand and it can be done profitably, someone will offer it.>>
If there's no alternative, no matter how many people want or need a cheaper roaming rate, nobody will do it. Why drop a substantial and essentially free revenue stream when there is no need for competition?
Getting a SIM without a local address is expensive. Most Dual SIM users are residents in the country taking advantage of the best price or coverage.
In many cases, only the sim sold at an airport is authorized for tourists. They are usually only cheaper wrt to the plans of few countries like the US, where there is very poor internal market competition.
I suppose as a 'newly' soverign nation, having to stand in the queue at the airport for a SIM, and upgrade to a dual SIM phone, and perhaps the faff of topping up that PAYG data SIM are the benefits of Brexit.
We can join America in the list of countries for whom expensive non-resident SIM plans are worthwhile. Whoop Whoop..
Soory, It's going to take me a fair few pints to start seeing the brexit dividend, can't wait for the cheap swill from our USA trade GreatestEverTM** 'agreement'.
After a few I can complain that England needs to regain their sovereignity from London and a London centric government.
I wonder how many pints it will take to understand your definition of 'sovereignity' too...
PS(** GreatestEverTM - trademark registration pending on Boris Johnson Rapscallion LLC subject to The BoJo Way - Any representation of suitability or fitness for purpose may not be implied)
>>> Most phones sold in the UK are dual SIM
Hang on - eSIMs are not quite the same thing for what we're discussing here about roaming.
for eg. In the UK, *none* of the operators do PAYG eSIM
So you can rarely use the eSIM while roaming.
And if you are a MVNO customer, you cannot use eSIM as the primary SIM.
You can buy global eSIM plans, they are rather expensive.
Whatever it is, local bills are not going down, nor rising slower, and roaming is more expensive.
Brexit giving the consumer more .... bills?
"Nobody offered a cheaper rate for this demand back in the Good Old Days when this was super profitable, before the charges were banned"
Well except for Three, who had free roaming between countries with partner networks in 2013 - four years before the EU directive took effect - and expanded it to cover most of the EU plus the USA a year later.
They only did it with the same Hutchison networks in other countries, and the other EU countries only came in as the legislation was tabled, with Three announcing it a couple of months before it was voted for.
The problem is that forming agreements is difficult, without regulation, to make the fat cat operators take notice, prior to the regulation it was a select list of networks, usually with the worst coverage and/or data throughputs in those countries. Three was (is) that in the UK.
The other factor in establishing agreements is that the number of inbound roamers must be similar to the outbound roamers to make it quid pro quo.. or they will reduce the roaming service quality. A point lost is that the Three non-EU/non-Three roaming agreements are TERRIBLY throttled. I think they are probably on a background traffic QoS. :D I have suffered this to get PDF of some tickets on holiday.
It is difficult for a small operator like Three to balance that out.
Market competition alone does not address all free market issues - regulation is a vital element to avoid cartelisation and oligopolistic behaviours.
This is another Brexit loss. All that seems to have been traded is that the big corps and billionaires, who supported Brexit, are now calling the shots. The little small business can pay the +80% UK shipping surplus.
>The other factor in establishing agreements is that the number of inbound roamers must be similar to the outbound roamers to make it quid pro quo.
Not sure about that...
Back in the late 1990's there were many more people roaming into Ireland than were roaming outside - for at least one Irish mobile operator, it was the difference between being able to grow and struggling to survive.
"I don't see why I should subsidise those who want EU roaming"
You weren't/aren't.
The actual operating costs for international roaming are neglible. They're barely any more than the costs of managing a call or data transfer between two domestic operators. It's fundamentally no more than a bilateral agreement on fees between the calling and called telco.
Telcos charged huge amounts for international roaming because they were/are able to get away with it. The perceived value to customers was far, far more than it cost to provide the service. So the telcos charged the maximum they thought the market would bear. They charged a small fortune for international roaming - and in many parts of the world still do. When the EU realised it was a giant scam, they put an end to it inside the EU/EEA single market.
BTW that price gouging went straight through to the telcos' bottom line. It was pure profit. Telcos didn't use this extra revenue to cut their prices elsewhere or cross-subsidise other parts of their business. They're probably making more from EU-wide roaming now because customers use it a lot more since they know they'll no longer get hit with a huge bill.
"Telcos charged huge amounts for international roaming because they were/are able to get away with it."
They pulled other shady shit too
In 1996, Telecom New Zealand hoovered up all excess satellite bandwidth out of the country and sat on it to keep other operators from being able to buy it and undercut their international call charges
It was cheaper to to this than reduce their rates, so that bandwidth went unused for 5 years.
They were hardly alone. A LOT of telcos around the planet did this or purchased legislation granting them local monopolies or "gatekeeper" status or outlawing voice/internet gateway services that cropped up
Less than a year later, telcos worldwide discovered people were making "free" voice calls across this new-fangled "Internet" thingie and almost instantly "ISPs" went from being their very best customers to mortal enemies. That's why Telcos parked their tanks on the lawn of being ISPs
The telcos became even more furious when they discovered that people were ditching faxes (a picture of a page) for email (the actual text) and saving 70-90%+ on call costs even when they'd built up monopolies on internet service (dialup email polling time vs fax call duration)
(When I worked for a govt owned telco there were plans in place to abolish LD charges on calls to neighbouring towns (50-100 miles) because the cost of sending/processing the bills was higher than the revenue. That was instantly stopped when privatised and it was only when actual competitoin showed up that rates dropped from dollars per minute to cents per minute on longer-haul connections. Even then the telcos usually did their utmost to obstruct interconnects, just like AT&T back in the 1930s before the FTC whacked it with sherman act charges)
I suspect that if St Elon could find a way of providing 4G level service on Starlink the telcos would rather quickly drop their rates. Their charging model is based on a switched network structure which hasn't really existed for 30 years. It's all data packets now
I thought it was a typo - 0.36p per MB. Unfortunately not.
Looking at EE Ts & Cs it's 36p per MB, so potentially £360 per GB.
It's also a bit vague on what your allowance would be if your package allowance is less than 50GB.
The actual cost of pushing 1GB across Europe (or most of the world) is as near zero as makes no difference when you divide the full term cost of infrastructure by the total data moved across it in it's lifetime.
Price gouging by companies happens 'because they can' - until regulators stop it.
Enforced free roaming was costing the phone companies a fortune, they were already trying other tricks to get the money from somewhere else. The business users won't care about this, their company pays, and for the personal users most hotels & similar places have free WiFi these days. I'd be hard pushed to use 25GB when roaming on holiday (I rarely even go above 5GB at home), so this definitely looks more like a way to grab back some money from captive business users.
I'd be hard pushed to use 25GB when roaming on holiday
I find most hotel "free" WiFi is hardly up to letting you check in for your return flight and I think the default family with kids could easily chew through 25GB during a fortnight's holiday just watching videos - though now they're no longer theoretically permitted to access many of their UK streaming services while abroad, I suppose one Brexit consequence compensates for another.
Actually, I think we will return to the days when business users got severely trodden on by their boss if they had roaming charges on their bill. "Even if it was only £1, our policy is that you don't use roaming data on your work phone except in business emergencies. What was the emergency?"
In the company I worked for, I noticed a complete change of ways of working for frequent travellers in Europe after the roaming charges went: they left their phones connected all evening and responded to messages after work. I think it will return to the days when you were lucky if they checked their email when they got back to their hotel room at night - and some were rather the worse for it!
Of course, Sales, and Executives, ignored the cost but everyone else wasted a load of time saving a penny here and a penny there in roaming charges because it was an easy thing for managers to manage!
After the referendum, the four main UK operators were noncommittal about whether they would re-introduce dreaded roaming charges, which saw punters rack up massive bills without even realising. In 2018, each said they had made no concrete plans, but their protestations were worded in a way that gave sufficient wiggle room for future changes.
I rather remember excitable quitters stating it was part of Project Fear and that our good British operators would never go back on their non-imposition of roaming charges.
They always were gullible.
You cannot prove a negative, so your entire argument is flawed.
You are positing that roaming laws caused price rises, and then say you cannot DIS-prove your own conjured assertion.
Have you got proof there aren't purple coloured people with rainbow coloured noses caused by Brexit?
This is a well documented logical fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative
I'm terribly unsurprised a Brexiter uses it.
The obvious thing to look are price rises, which did not exceed inflation.
"Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others."
So dear Brexiter the burden is on you to prove your claim.
Proud and patriotic Brexit supporters excited by new opportunity to pay more for their mobile bills
Proud Brexit supporters are today hailing the opportunity to pay more for their mobile bills when using them abroad, after years of meddling eurocrats needlessly securing them cheaper mobile rates throughout the EU.
As 02 and EE announced increased roaming charges in Europe, something prevented by EU legislation, proud Brexiters have hailed it as yet another Brexit dividend.
Brexit voter Derek Williams told us, “We knew what we voted for, and when they said roaming charges wouldn’t go up, we knew they were lying, so actually it’s only loser Remainers who are crying about this. I knew it was coming and I’m delighted with it.
“If I wanted some loathsome EU bastard making things more accessible and more affordable for me, I’d have voted for Remain like a big idiot, wouldn’t I?
It's almost as if a couple of large international telecoms companies have announced excess data roaming charges (that they could have applied anyway were we still EU members) on the 5th anniversary of the referendum just to ensure that people would blame Brexit rather than them.
On the other hand, 12GB is quite a lot to burn through on a two week holiday. I'm not a social meeja addict so am currently unaware of whether 12GB is a real limitation for the Facebook generation. It could be more of an issue for business travellers, but then I'd expect them to be using the WiFi at the client or hotel.
I'd also assume "free" WiFi will apply to tourists in pubs/bars/restaurants/hotels too. I suspect this may well be less of an issue these days than it was was pre-EU roaming rules.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that the mobile phone companies have decided to grab back some money from Brits roaming, as they only actually offered it because the law said they had to.
Plus they had a bad year in 2020 with everyone staying at home and not buying new phones and many actually downgrading their contracts during lockdown since they didn't need all that call and data allowance when they aren't going anywhere.
Then there is the cost of rolling out 5G that most of the consumers as apathetic about. And on top of that we had the UK gov following Uncle Sam advice to stop allowing Huawei kit on our 5G networks, so some mobile operators are needing to rip out Huawei kit they only recently installed to replace it with more expensive Uncle Sam approved equipment.
"so some mobile operators are needing to rip out Huawei kit they only recently installed"
NOBODY is doing that. The timeframe for removal allows it to age out of the product cycle
What's driving the costs up is being forced to buy UnkaSam's approved kit - at 3-4 times the cost of buying similar kit from chinese companies which hold most of the 5G patents
It's notable that Huawei pulled out of the UK market almost entirely. They're still selling enterprise kit in the EU - but they won't ship THAT to the UK either
And there's your answer folks, they hate you and will extract money from you under any pretext possible.
As someone who now rarely travels (last such trip was in 2002) I really have no problem with paying the extra should I need to go somewhere else, but on the basis of the installed capacity it's a joke as bits are cheaper than water now that the infrastructure is there and keeps getting faster down the same glass fibre.
Now, let me see, who else do I *really* hate? There's a long line of 'em to choose from.
is why bozo the clown and his cronies were the worst people ever to take charge of brexit
Because they have no idea how anyone beyond their bubble actually lives (labour are nearly as bad now...) and whats important to people.
The instant brexit was voted for, the Queen should have taken over the talks, appointed a bunch of experts to run them instead of a twat of tory davis who turned up minus his laptop and a list of terms to discuss, and got a proper deal between neighbour nations who want to trade despite differences on the way they are run.
Instead we have that there maybe a border between Northern Ireland and the republic, but it maybe in the sea.. or not..... or in Wales.. actually who knows where...a border agency that insists on triple checking form 5637374282H/P78 part 3 regarding the export of a resistor, but has'nt a clue of how many people are here illegally, and finally some bozo in 10 clowning street who takes credit for the vaccination program, but not the decisions that resulted in there being 1000s more cases here before taking any action...
And I used to think Thatcher was bad....
"The instant brexit was voted for,"
It wasn't. It was a non-binding referendum (aka opinion poll) and have nothing to do with the subsequent actions of the government
Brexit is officially the electoral policy of the Conservative party, not a referendum directive
So sayeth Theresa May's lawyers when the referendum was challenged - and accepted by the courts
Yes, they admitted the referendum wasn't binding - but that they decided to do it anyway
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