Roaming in Italy / Roaming in Israel

I can truthfully tell you that in the past 13 months I've been to Italy 4 times -- for a grand total of no more than 8 hours. My feet have touched terra firma - well, at least the tarmac - during plane changes to/from Israel.

I actually have Israeli dust in/on my Crocs - so the "roaming" is more apt than for Italy.

Wait - wait - not that kind of roaming - the other kind. Roaming - sure - that's the cell-phone lingo for "you didn't use our network so you're going to really pay for the phone call!"

Here's the Cingular/AT&T "damage" for my roaming in Italy and Israel. How close did you come when I challenged you to guess in one of my earliest blogs?

Italy - 6 minutes for ONLY $14.94 plus $1.87 International Tax. Now, you tell me, exactly who gets the International Tax? It's probably divided down to the last half cent between heaven only knows whom. I wonder how many days of negotiations it took to get it figured out??

Israel - 5 minutes for ONLY $6.45 plus $0.45 International Tax. A slightly better deal - possibly a different time of day. Who knows?!?

That's a total of 11 minutes (hold on to that number 11, it will be important in just a paragraph) for $21.39 plus $2.42 International Tax.

All my Cingular/AT&T "roaming" in Italy and Israel comes to a grand total of $23.81.

Eleven - 11 - the important number - - - yes, that's the price per minute I incurred when calling the States from Israel on my Israeli cell phone - 11 cents per minute.

Now, the bill came in increments of seconds rather than minutes. It was interesting to see a call for 1689 and realize - whew - I didn't shoot the whole wad - that's just seconds, not minutes.

Well, let's round up for some easy math (I was a music major, not a math major!). We can make it 1800 seconds and then easily divide by 60 seconds per minute and come up with a 30 minute phone call. More math! At 11 cents per minute, that's a grand total of $3.30.

Hmmmm. 30 minutes for $3.30 versus 11 minutes for $23.61.

Some one is laughing all the way to the bank with my pocketbook in hand!!

Here's to roaming -- roaming without highway banditry!!

Rabbi Heath

P.S. Despite the charges - it was vastly reassuring that I could flip my Cingular/AT&T phone open, wait for it to figure out it "wasn't in Kansas" anymore and adjust accordingly. Expensive, yet, for those times I wanted it - definitely worth it. As I learned at the phone company in quality training in the 1980's -- "quality" is conformance to requirements. The Cingular/At&T experience roaming overseas was "quality."