Technology fragmentation

Is it that mobile telecoms are increasingly getting technically fragmented?

We have countless technologies that are attempting to network us while on the move. WiFi, WiMAX, GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, Bluetooth, NFC, iDEN and several others. People argue that these have different purposes but does an average consumer care? I don't think so. At the end of the day, ease of use and transparency is what matters, exemplified by the dominance of GSM worldwide.

Telecom evangelists speak of seamless mobility across heterogeneous technologies but in my point of view, either the network has to become extremely intelligent core-to-edge or the user has to provide some form of input to switch media. That is without going in other issues like billing, authentication, content translation etc...

Mobile Roaming

Isn't roaming a very interesting topic? There are different definitions for this too:
FCC states:

roaming: In cellular technology (mobile telephone technology), the use of a wireless telephone outside a specified tariffed geographic area defined by the service provider (which area is usually called the "home" area); outside of the home area, additional charges usually apply.

Wikipedia has a much more holistic approach:

Roaming is a general term in wireless telecommunications that refers to the extending of connectivity service in a location that is different from the home location where the service was registered.

Since now, mobile operators have been quiet about roaming charges. In several cases, roaming charges have been 3000% higher than the national standard. Considering that operators pay each other a very small portion of these charges (Inter-Operator Tariff) one can think what profits can rise from roaming. In certain regions where high profile roaming is usual, a new base station can achieve Return of Investment (ROI) within a couple of months. The cost of a base station is in the region of hundreds of thousands of € or $ so one can think of how much revenue these services bring to the mobile operator.

Especially with data roaming, it has been reported that thousands of dollars have been charged because notebook computers chose to update software when connected to a mobile network (without the user noticing).

EU regulation is now starting to take place as most mobile operators have already conformed with the proposed initiative. They have been very quiet about it too.

In several areas, roaming accounts up to 10% of mobile operator revenues and most of these revenues are currently voice-related. Data revenues are expected to increase over the coming years but data roaming charges have to become transparent to the end user.

Update: Although Eurotariff has already been launched pretty much across Europe, regulation for SMS and data is not part of EU regulations! The EU will monitor high SMS and data charges and expects operators to drop prices voluntarily!

Internet words

Today I discovered a new word: cyberloafing. Several definitions exist (here and here). It is also called cyberslacking. Is the Internet changing human behavior far too much? I am sure that every connected person in the planet has a some point of their life committed to such an "e-crime". After all, the information available on the Internet is endless.