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Major US Carriers Open Free Calls And Texts To Brussels (androidheadlines.com)
An anonymous reader quotes from a report on AndroidHeadlines: Following the attacks at Brussels International Airport and the Maelbeek Subway Station in Brussels, Belgium earlier this morning, all four major U.S. carriers have announced that they will be offering their customers the opportunity to make free calls to Brussels, as a means of letting customers keep in contact with friends and loved ones who live or are traveling within the city, a gesture which both Verizon and Sprint offered to customers last year following the attacks in Paris, France. As the city of Brussels begins and continues to mourn in the wake of the attacks, Sprint, T-Mobile, ATT, and Verizon Wireless will all offer free calls and texts to Brussels from the U.S., beginning today and lasting throughout the next few days to a week.
Brussels is not a country (as some Americans think) but a city. Not sure how they differentiate calls to 'Brussels' (old area code 02) from calls to Belgium (+32) since 'area codes' there have been portable for at least a decade and most of them are on mobile phones (area code 04).
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Calls from Brussels will be changed at roaming rate unless they also say both ways. and you may have to pay for incoming txts.
...people are encouraged to minimize (cell)phone usage because the networks are overloaded.
In emergency situations carriers are usually over loaded why do we want to add to that load
Email, texts, video chats are all "free" when travelling through the Internet, but standard long distance telephone calls are charged by the minute.
And in most cases they travel through the same gear on the way from origin to destination.
Why is is that they can get away with charging for long distance telephone service as a separate line item at all? Is it just because people are used to the idea? Crank Crank Crank... "Hello, Mabel? Please ring George at the corner store."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Yeah, with all the collateral damage, there will be lots of roaming rats.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Does this mean I can order waffles and it won't cost me anything?
You are welcome on my lawn.
an already overloaded system? Our office in Brussels hasn't been able to make phone calls all day and their Internet access has been down for hours. Text messages are also spotty.
Cripes, when there is some attack in Europe, which kills dozens of people, it is big news in the media. When there is a car bomb in Baghdad, which kills just as many, there is barely a mention. There are not enough casualties in Brussels for me to care. Furthermore, this is slashdot, I shouldn't have heard about this bombing at all. I want an Oklahoma City, 2004 Madrid Train Bombing, or 1983 Beirut marine barrack sized bombing, before it appears on slashdot. And, I certainly don't want to see this fluff story here.
Cool advertisement for the phone companies Slashdot.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
The most interesting question, though, would be to know which service providers went under. I am on Mobile Vikings, an MVNO that resells the BASE network. I had no issue sending or receiving calls, texts or data all day, even though I avoided it; the guy next to me on Mobistar lost service around 10.00. We were in the downtown area around 1KM from Maelbeek. I've heard other people on the outskirts of the city lost all service from 8.30 until late this evening. My hypothesis is that since BASE has fewer subscribers but a similar infrastructure to Mobistar and Proximus, they can actually handle the traffic if everybody calls at once.
Anybody else got any reports or know more about how cell technology works?
For what it's worth, I don't think we need to worry about this any more. The crisis is over, it's 10:00 at night, the city is as quiet as Christmas eve. The Crisis Center is still recommending that you avoid telephoning, to be sure, but that post has been up for 12 hours now and they've knocked off for the night. They've been recommending SMS, by the way, since it's not saturated.
This is important, while the Baghdad bombings are not, for two reasons. First, terrorist attacks are not normal in Europe as they are in Baghdad. Thus it's news.
More importantly, Europeans have power while Iraqis do not. Maybe not so much military projection power as the US, but still a lot of military and economic power. Therefore their reaction to this matters.
For starters, the lives of over one million Syrian refugees are in our hands. This is a continent with a history of packing up undesired populations and executing them, and the holocaust is not the only time that happened. Not that such a thing would happen now, but you get otherwise credible people saying we should just fly them back to Syria. Or maybe Europe will decide it's time to make peace with the Jihadis. Sure, organize your expeditions into the US here. We don't care. Or maybe you could bomb the UK, they're even closer and not really European.
If you don't think that will affect you wherever you live, you're pretty thick.
You are an asshole but you point out to an important process - we will get used to it. With the open borders policy, that one German woman forces on the whole of EU, import of skilled jihadists, their teachers and helpers as well as their hardware is not a problem anymore thus we will get used to it. When the bomb attacks start being done every other week the special discount or rebate discussed in TFA will be over and the news of the bombings will move away from first pages unless a big one goes off.
Alternatively I can imagine security will go OTT and we replace (or augment) terrorist with total supervision by police state. Not sure if anybody wins in any of these scenarios but I am sure we citizens will be sorry.
More U.S. support to terrorists from their master handlers, wherever they reside (ahem: NATO HQ, right under the chandelier). Laughable measure, given it only concerns less than 100 U.S. wholly unimportant folks at the Brussels' AA departure desk. And the very famous arrestee is known in Brussels' gay prostitution circles, involving beer and cigarettes, a capital punishment under IS rules, who "supposedly suddenly claims" responsibility for this heinously coward act.
Deus vult faggot.
how very nice of them.
I tried to call to work (in BXL) this morning but it was not possible because the cellphone network was overloaded.
The landline telephone network was OK.
Also known as Europe's Middle East.
They are not just Syrian refugees. Plenty of them go back and forth to be trained by ISIS. In that sense a large portion of them are invaders. There is no way to make peace with Muslims unless you are willing to accept Sharia "law" for all.
And it's only Germany that has a brief history of packing up and executing their own people, not any immigrants. Europe and in particular Belgium is way too accepting of these refugees. For decades they have allowed them to come in and make use of the established social services without any prior economic input or benefits. Now they expect even more people to come in and not acclimate to the local culture?
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The real refugees are running from the very same people that are blowing things up. They're not the problem. The problem is that there is no way to distinguish between those running from the chaos, and those running in to start the chaos.
So at some point it comes down to deciding who will pay the price of the instability in the Middle East -- the people who live there want to get away from it, but the problems sneak in amongst them. So do we turn everyone back and watch them die, or do we let them in and get blown up ourselves? Political will seems to be on taking some of the burden, but the popular opinion has never been unified and is undoubtedly going to get even more fragmented after an event like this.
Meanwhile, the governments involved want more power to spy on us, the people who haven't been blowing up airports, because it is too hard (next to impossible) to background check a flood of immigrants. It's security theater at its worst.
I don't have a good answer, it's really an unsolvable problem for someone. All that can really be handled is deciding who has to deal with it.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Not that I think it's a bad idea, or anything -- It's just not as big a deal as it might seem, unless you compare this to their normal prices to call Belgium.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
isn't it illegal for companies to collude?
I mean yeah, it's for a "good cause" and all but still...
Only Germany, comrade?
They are not just Syrian refugees. Plenty of them go back and forth to be trained by ISIS. In that sense a large portion of them are invaders. There is no way to make peace with Muslims unless you are willing to accept Sharia "law" for all.
What a load of nonsense. The refugees are not the ones travelling to Syria to fight, they are the ones travelling out of Syria.
The main problem in Belgian are second generation immigrants, the children of immigrants that moved there 30+ years ago. Kids who feel marginalized and have a romantized idea of their home from their parents, so they travel back to fight for ISIS, until they realise it sucks ass and comes back. A few come back really nutters though and commit terrorism.
If I'm not mistaken, as soon as you make a call to a different country you are placed into a special group of americans where the nsa and other alphabet groups automatically get to dig around in all your personal affairs, finances and so on. Cheers!
Major US Carriers Open Free Calls And Texts To Brussels. All your calls and texts will be rerouted to Utah, though, with no chance of them arriving at Brussels.
aaaaaaa
Russia/USSR has never been part of Europe/EU or any of its precursors. They're part of Asia geographically and have always remained separate both economically and politically.
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