Dual Mobile Phone BS in Turkey
Bornova, Turkey

I've seen this before, and I really can't believe people tolerate this nonsense anywhere on the planet. Here in Turkey, the populous is "forced" to buy and carry around two mobile phones because it's so outrageously expensive to call a phone number carried by a different cell provider.

There are two primary mobile phone companies in this country, and everyone suffers because of the fees associated with the manipulative system that's in place. Now it's not just cell phone owners that are impacted. There are additional fees involved for calling a mobile number from a landline—so much so that it's practically impossible to get a shopkeeper or anyone else to call a cell phone from a conventional telephone.

I can understand experiencing it in places like Colombia (where the problem is rampant across several competing mobile phone service providers), but in Turkey? It seems very out of place.

I'm really surprised we're not seeing mobile phones capable of supporting more than one SIM card, or one provider that decides to cut out the competition by normalizing the price of calls, regardless the service provider for the number.

But none of that is happening. People are still buying and continuously refilling the pre-paid minutes on both of their mobile phones.

I honestly don't think I've met a single person with a mobile phone in Turkey that doesn't have two cell phones (and these things aren't necessarily all that cheap here—most trendy teens and twenty-somethings can drop a couple hundred bucks on a phone).

Explore photos from Turkey

Browse more entries