Big Four allegedly gouging rural carriers on roaming

by Chris Ziegler posted May 25th 2006 at 4:03PM

Excuse our lack of shock on this one, but if you believe what the nation's rural carriers are saying, the Big Four aren't playing nice with roaming agreements. Thanks to extensive build-outs, the days when Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile relied heavily on mom-and-pop companies to provide rural coverage are long gone. The opposite, however, is not true: customers of rural carriers are virtually always roaming when they venture into civilization. The inequity is leading to some unpleasant pricing schemes that are making business tough if you don't own a national network. USA Today specifically cites NTCH, SouthernLinc, and Leap Wireless as getting the shaft from Sprint, Nextel (both pre-merger), and Verizon respectively, all of whom have made roaming prohibitively expensive or disallowed it entirely. So far, the FCC hasn't put its foot down, but an investigation is underway and rural carriers are calling for the enforcement of consistent, reasonable roaming rates. Hey, FCC, while you're at it, can you enforce a consistent rate of $2/gallon for gas? No?

Filed under: ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless

Tags: leap wireless, LeapWireless, ntch, roam, roaming, rural, southernlinc

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

ChillyWilly @ May 25th 2006 4:32PM

I hope the FCC can step in here and do something about this. This is pretty much right in-line with what their real job is. Seems they have been spending way too much time lately fighting offensive material being broadcast then managing bandwidth and taking care of rural and local carriers that need their support.

Neutral

Rusty` @ May 25th 2006 9:42PM

I'm not up on this..but..is there some kind of law that requires carriers to let other mobile ops roam on their towers? I know that a lot of carriers are dumping subscribers if they roam more than 50% of the time or something like that. Seems from the blog I read that there were a lot of college kids who have phones with their parents name, go across the country to college, roam on another tower (but with nationwide coverage) and they get dropped for roaming more than 50% of the time.

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