All right, I've just arrived at Seattle for the annual Microsoft MVP Summit. While I'm normally fine to use my Vodafone WebSessions SIM card for international data roaming, unfortunately Vodafone isn't offering WebSessions in the U.S. because they don't have any GSM/UMTS shares here (but are a shareholder of Verizon Wireless only). Since I will be in Seattle again next month, I've visited AT&T as well as T-Mobile shops to figure out what my prepaid mobile data options are and guess what - there are no options! Unlike most (or all?) European carriers, non of the U.S. carriers offers prepaid SIMs which can be used for real mobile data as well.

For sure I neither want to subscribe for a 24 months contract nor I can since I don't have a bank account here and therefore I'm left and either have to use my German SIM cards for inbound roaming or have to stick with WiFi like available at Starbucks and others.

That's definitely too bad and I think U.S. carriers are missing an opportunity to make some more revenue. Since inbound roaming fees are absurd expensive, I will not use my German SIMs for too much data traffic here and therefore nobody made anything out of the situation. Too bad that international (data) roaming is still that expensive. Now we have great standards like GSM and UMTS, which are virtually used and supported all over the world, but at the end you cannot/better don't use it since fees are prohibitive expensive.

Cheers ~ Arne