Europe's mobile network

One of the biggest unfulfilled promise, in my mind, of the EU's common market is the fact that there is not one unified phone service provider. I think it's ridiculous that I can travel the equivalent of a small US state, and find my phone's sim completely useless upon crossing the border into a neighboring country.

There are certainly large providers Tmobile, Vodafone, O2 Telefonica that provides service in several countries, but none of them can claim to operate in "most" much less all of the EU. Instead they claim that upon entering a country that they don't service you should still be able to have a working phone through their "partner" networks. In theory you should have uninterrupted service, with a slight additional fee, but nothing too noticeable due to EU tariff restrictions. However this has NEVER worked out for my phone anywhere I've gone thus far!

I've done a lot of scouring of travel forums and find many posts by Australians in a similar position to myself. The options for using a prepaid sim card over a subscription basically break down to 3 choices (most only accessible through British retailers):

1) Get a global sim: higher, but mostly negligible, fees. Data is still a bit of a novelty for this market niche (not sure why as most people picking up these sim cards are prob international travelers with a smartphone). You would think these things would be about as common as an ice cream shop next to a fat camp/ gym, but on my last trip to Brussels when I asked at the airport if I could pick one up they said they were sold out. I was impressed by GO-SIM which seemed to have a nice broad list of operating in 75 countries, data, and would cost about 20 pounds for a starter set plus shipping.

2) Pick up a different sim card in every country you go to. The price of a prepaid sim is so ridiculously low, that in pure cost terms I can understand the logic. However, I'm not looking to start a collection of these things like they were baseball cards. They're ridiculously small, and lack a convenient way of hold them. I've tried every possible pocket in my wallet and they always find a way of ending up on the floor. That's bye bye 10+ Euros if I'm not careful about looking on the ground. Add to that the fact that if you're someone who's traveling within a city or country for less than a week, do you really want to spend half a day at an electronic store/ phone boutique picking one of these suckers up?

3) Rely on your major carrier to be able to utilize a partner or competitor's network as stated above. All of the major mobile service providers list option plans for travelers, especially for roaming within the EU. In fact O2, which I currently use, stated that for their prepaid sims it is an AUTOMATICALLY ACTIVATED SERVICE. For some of my other friends, it has been about as easy as receiving/sending a txt message to confirm that it is okay to connect to another network once they power up in another country, and they were good to go. I thought this would be the most convenient method, but I have been finding that the ease of switching service networks as you switch borders to be a load of crap. I've never gotten anything besides a network unavailable and an emergency call option out of my phone even if it can see the other phone networks.

Possible difficulties due to the handset itself. There are some issues that I feel might be inherent in the fact that the Nexus is not available for retail in Europe beyond Great Britain.

Mobile internet for some reason has always been a huge annoyance I don't know how convenient it is supposed to be for other phones, but following activation instructions for me only gets me as far as seeing that I have credit to spend on the network without any ability for actual net access. I'm not sure if it's something inherently lacking in the Nexus's design, but access to both internet and MMS services seems to require me manually inputting the NAT info for the network, which is not the most convenient thing to track down. Phone and sms always work as soon as I put in the chip, and call the network with the activation code, but it's been beyond my research to find a reason as to why getting internet from the same network has been such a pain in the ass.