Jeremy McGee (an ex-Borlander) writes that:
To be fair to T-Mobile this isn't a situation that's exclusive to the US. Over here in the UK we, too, have to have the call bar lifted on international roaming and international calls.
But Jeremy goes on to explain why:
This is partly because the international rates are (usually) stupidly expensive. For some reason this is especially the case for US mobile carriers. So with debt at the level that it is with mobile telcos I'm not surprised they want to do an extra credit check.
OK, so they want to find out if I can pay for all of those long distance calls. Fair enough. But they should be smart enough to ask about this at activation time, not after I actually arrive in Munich. On the question of US myopia about the rest of the world though, Jeremy had this factoid (have to check)
87% of US citizens don't have passports.
So I stand by my complaint that we need to start thinking globally in the US. How can we be the "world's policeman" and not know anything about the world??
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