It’s interesting that roaming charges were eliminated in the EU when roaming from one member state to another. In principle, this could be great for consumers so that competition sufficiently suppresses unreasonable GSM costs.

But then the EU brought in what they call a “fair use” law. This blocks continuous roaming. Which effectively denies consumers the benefits of competition.

In Belgium we have only 3 real GSM carriers. The rest are MVNOs. So we get shitty deals on prepaid service.

www.iot-sim.tech has a quite interesting deal: 1gb for 10 years for €10. The raw price per gig is bad, but the credit persists for 10 years which is quite generous compared to all options in Belgium (use-it-or-lose-it in 1 year).

So as a consequence, iot-sim.tech has a rule that the comms can only be used IOT or M2M, perhaps due to some strange exception. But that’s a bit of a perverse outcome because it really should not matter whether the signal is “personal” or not.