[wolfbln]

I don't agree that the world is coming together and we'll get rid of roaming surcharges soon. What happens is that single carriers are taking the lead to have an edge over their competitor. But unless legislation steps in like in the EU, roaming is still big business for most of them.

The often quoted T-Mobile US "unlimited" offer is capped at 384 kbps for roaming. This makes fluent web browsing impossible. Come on, everywhere 4G/LTE networks are being installed and you see 2.5G technology as the best you can get. Furthermore, by their "uncarrier campaign" T-mobile US is blurring the lines between prepaid and postpaid. The fact remains that T-Mobile's prepaid customers are still banned from any 'unlimited' roaming. After all, don't forget this is a prepaid forum! You'll need to sign a contract of min. $50 per month and pass a credit score check. This makes this option quite unappealing, if you are on Verizon and want to make a short trip. You can't just change carriers or buy a 2nd plan for a limited time.

And nobody follows T-Mobile in their US market for worldwide roaming, so far as I can see. Some MVNOs and partly AT&T have added Mexico and Canada roaming to their plans without surcharges. In Mexico AT&T Unidos charges the same for Mexico as for Canada or the US in some plans.

I think this will be the new trend: regional surcharge-free roaming zones like within North America or from 2017 by legislation within the EU. Movistar's "sin fronteras" promotion on Central American networks and Claro's counterpart (this in on postpaid only) is another example.

A second trend has been around for quite a while: by giving 'free' roaming allowances in postpaid contracts like T-mobile US and some other operators on both sides of the Atlantic, they'll try to drive customers to postpaid and further discredit prepaid as operators see the prepaid market as one of a lower margin. Recently, for the consumer a Swiss study came to a totally different result: For domestic voice and text alone 90% of all customers pay less on prepaid compared to postpaid in the EU. But this result changes dramatically when roaming is included and data use.

Looking beyond regions, I can hardly see any signs that roaming rates are really coming down. On the contrary, with more and more data needs and consumption the cost for data steadily increases while roaming surcharges remain pretty high and stable. Ironically, this tendency seems to toughen now in Europe. While roaming rates within the EU are brought down by law, unregulated rates to and from the 'rest of the world' have been increased lately by some carriers.