I arrived in Miami last night, and first port of call this morning was Walmart to get myself a US Sim Card. It’s very frustrating that I still have to dance through hoops to pay a reasonable price for mobile data while abroad for even just a few days.

This makes me appreciative of the European Union, who have repeatedly and successfully spanked mobile operators into finally offering sane roaming prices throughout Europe. Outside of Europe the regulators are toothless so EE, my operator (who I already pay $50 a month), want to fleece me out of $1.60 a minute to make a phone call, and $4.50 for 20mb of data (expiring after 24 hours).

Today I paid $38 for a T-Mobile SIM with 5GB of data, and a super helpful woman at Walmart got it activated for me in five minutes. Apple don’t help things by changing the size of their SIM cards on an almost yearly basis - last time I was in San Francisco there was an epic quest to track down a micro SIM.

I know there are loads of businesses servicing this roaming market, but really the mobile industry just needs to sort its shit out and charge me 3x my home rate which would be nicely profitable but not daylight robbery. Apart from businesses, almost everyone I know defaults to turning off roaming completely rather than come back to a phone bill that costs more than their flight.