KumaarShah 143 Report post Posted July 3, 2007 Beware of ghost roamers! KALYAN PARBAT TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ TUESDAY, JULY 03, 2007 07:30:57 AM] KOLKATA: Living in West Bengal and using a prepaid cellphone connection? In case you are, and your work involves endless trips to towns on the state’s borders with either Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar or Orissa, you’d better keep an hawk’s eye on the talktime balance. Especially, when you’re in a state border town and choose to receive a call. You may be totally unaware that your cellphone has silently hooked onto a mobile network across the border as the signal is strong. So what you took for an innocuous free incoming call on your home network, no longer is, since you’re suddenly a ‘ghost roamer’ shelling out Rs 1.75 per minute as inbound roaming charges. Welcome to ‘Live national roaming 24 x 7’ for prepaid mobile subscribers, where your talktime balance could vanish real quick if you’re not careful! This will hold true for any prepaid subscriber making frequent trips to border towns within their home state. Especially, since ‘national roaming’ is ‘continuously activated by default’ for prepaid subscribers. These days, nearly 90% of the country’s 175 million mobile subscribers are prepaid users and the built-in national roaming feature has been a huge draw, especially after Trai scrapped monthly rentals on national roaming. So, whether you’re an Airtel, Hutch, BSNL-CellOne , Idea, Reliance or Spice prepaid subscriber, you could end up roaming within your home turf every time you hit a border town. Things could get really tricky if you’re at an inter-state border where your cellular service provider is also the licensed operator across the border. The same jinx could easily haunt ignorant postpaid mobile subscribers. But in this case, national roaming needs to be activated by requesting the operator. It isn’t seamless as in the case of prepaid users. When contacted, sources at Airtel, Hutch and BSNL-CellOne confirmed the phenomenon , but declined to discuss the tariff impact . “This is precisely why we only activate national roaming when a postpaid subscriber requests for the facility. We’ve received feedback that customers travelling frequently within West Bengal to towns near the Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar or Assam borders have at times paid roaming charges for receiving what they thought were free incoming calls. Cellphones can easily get plugged onto a different network on the other side of the state border if signal strength is strong. So a prepaid user in a Bengal border town may suddenly be roaming on another mobile network depending on the location and signal strength,” they said. Elaborating, an Airtel official said: “When such cases do surface, we invariably run a check and there have been instances where we’ve refunded roaming charges collected inadvertently for calls near inter-state border towns. This can happen anywhere in the country where there are multiple operators on either side of a state border.” Interestingly, while postpaid users are largely safe, prepaid users travelling frequently to state border towns have evolved homegrown strategies to skirt the roaming trap. “We understand some prepaid customers who travel to border towns either switch off cellphones there or carry multiple SIM cards. If a tea industry guy is near the Bengal-Assam border in a place like Alipurduar that’s close to Dhubri (in Assam), he may carry separate SIM cards. He could easily use the relevant Assam network SIM even while in West Bengal,” said a top industry source speaking under conditions of anonymity. See the technology has made so much advances that you end up paying for incoming calls also as in the past. The more things change, the more they remain the same. HA HA HA Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
linuxguy 0 Report post Posted July 3, 2007 nonsense. if you keep your cell's network selection on manual and you leave your circle and enter into a new circle, you will be asked to choose a new network EVEN IF IT IS YOUR OWN SERVICE PROVIDER'S CIRCLE. So you're made aware of the fact that you're in roaming. If you set your network selection to automatic then you wont be alerted that you've entered a roaming location. Unfortunately such settings are NOT possible on CDMA handsets! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
