In Romania, they were hit very hard by the recent cold weather that suddenly swept in over most of southern Europe, allegedly from Siberia. People died, not as many as in Ukraine, but nevertheless people in the European Union are dying from cold in 2012. In an interesting charity campaign, several large Romanian telecommunications operators decided to extend preferential deals to their customers in areas heavily affected by snow. Large provider Orange, owned by France Telecom, gave 200 free minutes on their networks and 10 minutes outside of their networks to clients in heavily affected areas. Cosmote, another big provider, followed suit. Suddenly, telecommunications providers in Romania were sending help-packages, food, clothes, to affected areas, mostly in the countryside. I didn't track down the exact offer from Vodafone, the third large provider (they're not listed in order of size in this blogpost, and I didn't look up their exact market shares), but allegedly they made one similar to Orange.

I find it interesting that the telecommunications providers are the ones to step in to provide catastrophe help in Romania in terms of food packages, but notice perhaps more that the aid offer they provided initially actually locks their customers in snow-affected, rural areas of Romania in to their own networks. Since in Europe we don't have any regulation which would make it mandatory for large infrastructure providers to keep their activities on the infrastructure separate from the activities they do with respect to service provision, it's not like Vodafone and Orange and Cosmote can cooperate to give the best possible services to everyone in Romania at every given time. Instead, if you're on competing networks, or competing infrastructures even though the infrastructures technically follow the same standards and are perfectly interoperable with each other, and you're also on the countryside stuck under two meters of snow, you'll simply have to make short phone calls.