Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for December 24, 2021

The look on his face says he forgot.

He gets a $3,000,000 phone bill, a couple weeks later.

That’s gonna be a budget-buster.

How can there be a ROAMING option on your iPhone?

Ruuht row

Back in the early days of cellular roaming was a big thing. Nowadays there are a handful of service providers and most of them have a national network and as long a you stay in network, you are OK.

In the olden days if you were a Cellular One customer (for example) and you went from the Seattle Market to the Portland Market, you had to call a special number to let the company know that you were in Portland and then wait a couple of minutes before you could make or receive calls. And then you were charged with roaming even with the same company.

When roaming became automatic, you sometimes got slapped with roaming because you were in a high rise parking lot out of site of the “B” carrier’s cell tower (singular) for the city and automatically got picked up by the “A” carrier for that market.

Then there was the case of people driving through an area and their phone would “ping” a local tower. Even though no calls were made or received, the local company would try to hit you with a roaming fee.

The wireless world was kind of like the wild west in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

It is difficult for an old timer like me to believe that the technology is close to 40 years old already.

Why?

If you go to the capital of Italy, you will always be roamin’.

C’mon, Santa has to have a sat phone. :)

Android

Merry Christmas!

“On Comcast …”