IronEE telecoms

I might have mentioned that I recently changed mobile phone network from the well known T-Mobile to a new and thriving, community led, network called GiffGaff.  I like 'community led' technology and hence Linux is my computer operating system of choice too.

And the result is that the change was definitely a good move.  T-Mobile had massively increased their tariffs recently and over the years had gradually eroded my feeling of good will.

Having spent a few days in Paris recently, I was amazed how little it cost me to use the phone so often, even though at international rates. But the point of this post is not so much to praise Giffgaff as to ridicule my former network.  I haven't yet converted all the family from their clutches.  I had to top up the credit on another phone tonight.  What I found was briefly interesting, and quite quickly risible.

In what appears to be the beginning of a major rebranding exercise, Orange and T-Mobile are now going to call themselves Everything Everywhere Ltd (UK), or EE for short.  Taking the name literally, one might expect more than appears to be on offer.

Given that I anticipate a lot of visits and calls to Paris over the next 3 years, for just the briefest moment I wondered whether EE was going to fill that huge and obvious gap in European telecoms, by providing a network that treats the whole EU as a single entity.  By doing that they could make it so easy for EU citizens to travel freely between countries without paying exorbitant prices for accidentally straying to a roaming network.  I've noticed this happening tens of miles from a border in some cases.  It must be annoying to live in an area where a local call accidentally becomes international.

Too good to be true?  Indeed yes.

Apparently and ironically, 'Everywhere' is not an area as big as you might expect.  Just the other side of the English Channel, France is presumably 'Nowhere'  in the eyes of EE, as any 'Somewhere' would surely be included in 'Everywhere'.