Tech: GPRS roaming works… technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.
FWIW, I’ve never met anyone who’s used GPRS for anything other than the odd demo, or emergency use only, except for employees of the mobile carriers — and they get it for free.
My bet is that the basic failure was a disconnect between the real world and the specification stages — someone somewhere picked up one of those massively-inflated analyst reports a few years ago, said ‘I’d like a piece of that road-warrior market which will be worth $5 billion by 2005, it says here!’ and set prices (to stun) accordingly.