Alan wrote:
On Sat, 29 May 2004 21:49:55 +1000, "A Mate"
wrote:

Last year - I used local pre-paid sims in Ireland, Italy and Turkey. NO
charge for incoming!!

Maybe not for pre-paid. I was on Telstra roaming:

Ireland:
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/pro...eratorid=28071
or http://tinyurl.com/2cz5e

gives incoming at AU$0.41, with a setup of AU$0.40. On the same site,
you can check Turkey ($0.80,$0.40) or Italy ($0.45, $0.40). I suspect it
is factored into the overall cost on pre-paids, because talking to
locals in Italy we confirmed that incoming was charged on their normal
mobiles, not just something Telstra added on. It varied a little in cost
between servers, and was something we checked before choosing when
roaming.

Australia is one of the very few countries that doesn't charge for
incoming. We travelled 14 countries in Europe. All charged incoming.
It's one reason we left the phone off most of the time, and called
people back or emailed after checking messages. It's hard to politely
get people to shut up when they don't realise it's costing you as well
as them.

You were charged for incoming because you used an *Australian* mobile
phone (/SIM) while *outside* Australia. I.e. you have an Australian
phone number, but are outside Australia.

That is normal, i.e. as soon as I take my Dutch mobile phone outside
The Netherlands, I pay for incoming calls. What I pay is the part which
is *not* payed by the caller. The idea is that the caller has no way of
knowing that I am not in The Netherlands, so it is not fair for hir to
pay for the fact that I happen to be abroad, so (s)he pays the normal
local Dutch rate (i.e. so to speak "to the border") and I pay the rest,
i.e. "from the Dutch border" to whereever I happen to be.

So it seems that in the civilized world, there is no charge for an
incoming call to a local mobile phone number! :-)

[deleted]