What is "roaming"?

What is "roaming"?

TJ McClearin (Business Manager, Infinity Wireless, LLC) gives expert video advice on: What is "bandwidth"?; What is "broadband"?; What is "roaming"? and more...

Roaming is basically if you're with Carrier A, and Carrier A owns a piece of the network, and you go somewhere where there's no Carrier A, you have to roam on Carrier B. That's basically utilising someone else's network because they're saying that you can. It's like a written agreement that the carriers have put in place beforehand, and in doing so, the carriers get charged and pass that charge on to you, which is why there are roaming charges. Typically now though, you don't see carriers that have roaming charges within the United States because everybody's pretty much sharing networks now and everybody has an agreement, so the data charges that get incurred, as far as roaming goes, basically happen mostly internationally. So, when you're in France, and you're using a French network vs. a U.S. network, you would get charged the same.