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EU Mobile Roaming Charges Scrapped (bbc.com)
From now on, European Union holidaymakers should return home without that sense of high anxiety about their mobile phone bill: extra fees for using it abroad should have gone. From a report: The new rules mean that citizens travelling within the EU will be able to call, text and browse the internet on mobile devices at the same price they pay at home. The European Commission said the end of roaming charges was one of the greatest successes of the EU. But a UK consumer group warned phone users could face "unexpected charges." Until now roaming, or connection, charges have been added to the cost of calls, texts and internet browsing when consumers from one EU country travelled to another and connected to a mobile network there.
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The European Commission said the end of roaming charges was one of the greatest successes of the EU
If that is one of their "greatest successes" then the EU is a good approximation of worthless. Sure roaming charges are an issue but are a very minor problem in the grand scheme of things.
We had an EU friendly phone plan. We drove to Andorra...great skiing, good food, nice hospitality. There was a thief in the Mountains, who waylaid our travelers....Andorra Telecom. They sent a message saying that we'd used 50 euro in data (for some google maps...an hour's drive maybe). We turned off data. Then, they shut off our phone for a 250 euro data charge, which had magically run up in that 45 minutes before the 50 euro shutoff message. Andorra Telecom put a black eye on an otherwise interesting place-they are a robber in the hills...so . F@!K Andorra Telecom.
It's not possible to legislate a cost into oblivion. Roaming costs will get moved into a different user fee. Stupid people will think that their government just "solved an issue". Smart people understand what's really going on.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Panties Stink!
They really, really stink!
Sometimes they're red, sometimes they're green,
Sometimes they're white or black or pink
Sometimes they're satin, sometimes they're lace
Sometimes they're cotton and soak up stains
But at the end of the day, it really makes you think
Wooooooo-wheeeee! Panties stink!
Sometimes they're on the bathroom floor
Your girlfriend- what a whore!
Sometimes they're warm and wet and raw
From beneath the skirt of your mother-in-law
Brownish stains from daily wear
A gusset full of pubic hair
Just make sure your nose is ready
For the tang of a sweat-soaked wedgie
In your hand a pair of drawers
With a funky feminine discharge
Give your nose a rest, fix yourself a drink
cause wooooooo-wheeeeeee! panties stink!
.. and don't brexit, frexit, itexit, portexit etc.
I can travel across a whole continent with my phone and not face roaming charges. You guys act so superior, but you suck.
"EU Mobile Roaming Charges Scrapped" Sorry but the title is a filthy lie. EU included possibility for operators to be excluded from dropping prices so they're all going for it. Finlands been in the EU since 1995 and our customs agency are just now in 2017 starting to realize they've been illegally destroying millions worth of alcohol and charging tens of millions illegal extra taxes on import cars over decades. EU has no spine, muscles, teet or brain. They should be doing something about the tens of millions of unemployed european youth instead of making laws which won't take effect for decades.
Both T-mobile and Google Fi offer worldwide free roaming, the EU is years behind
-]Phreak Out[-
by that same token, so would skype or vonage.. since they also use the fucking internet via wifi to "roam".
Both T-mobile and Google Fi offer worldwide free roaming, the EU is years behind
The EU is pushing this through regulation, because the companies weren't willing to do this themselves. T-Mobile and Google Fi aren't European based operators, as far as I am aware? In France there is one operator who offers a great plan, one that being resident in Canada seems excellent, if I only make outgoing calls: http://mobile.free.fr/ Ignoring the features for people using the phone in France, here are the out of country features (translated), all for 19€/month:
I have to pay my ISP $57/month in Canada, and I don't get any of those international features. Heck when I do travel it is $10/day for 100MB of data, which work out to be around $300/month for 3GB of data!? It is cheaper for me to get a SIM card when I go to a new country, even if it is just for a week. T-Mobile is great in the USA for the pay-as-you-go plans.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
T-Mobile has Deutsche Telekom as a majority owner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My UK Vodafone contract already had EU roaming included in it when I went to Germany recently, so I knew that I could keep roaming turned on as I intended to use google maps and the like while I was away. However to get to Europe we took the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. on that ferry trip, my phone picked up the Telenor maritime cell signal from the ferry, which counts as "rest of world" at £6 per meg! I wasn't even using the phone. it had just been checking email etc while I was asleep. Woke to an £18 extra bill for that...
so be careful on the seas people...
Except that at least for fi, it isn't reliant on the internet to roam. When I was down in Mexico I wasn't on wifi most of the time, yet I was still roaming for free.
T-Mobile is in the EU.
So, what did happen? This regulation has been in the works for ages. Companies knew it was coming and could prepare. Where I am, the average subscription cost (including cellphone) has raised with 22% in the last four years, in a period with ~0% inflation. I gave up on that, and went a SIM-only subscription for 15€/month. For that I got 6000 units (SMS/call) nationally, and 5GB data nationally. For roaming I paid on usage. If you don't roam often: You just make sure you don't exaggerate and use Wifi when possible. My last vacation, I had a full blown 4€ roaming bill, for one week of Portugal for two lines (my wifes line and mine). That's cheap.
Now, with the regulation, my cellphone provider gave me the following options:
In summary: Option 1. gives me less for the same money. I don't know how you feel about it, but being able to call or get called when you are abroad is an essential feature of having a cellphone. I could see this plan be useful for kids and teenagers, but not for normal mobile adults. Even adults like me who do a few vacations a year and perhaps a business trip or two.
Option 2, is basically: pay more, for getting less. Sure, you might argue that I get "more" in the sense I can call EU wide, but in the day to day case, I simply pay more.
Option 3 is really just pay much much more to get exactly what I had. I mean, that's 144€ per line, per year more, simply to keep the ability to roam and have "decent" amount of data.
Now, granted, if you are the cosmopolite Eurotrotter you will be better off. Keep in mind that those people are already people who earn a better living. So, basically, this really is the "poorer" (or more frugal) people subsidizing the richer people. Incidentally, the EU Commissioners are notorious Eurotrotters. For them this is awesome. For normal people much less. I do suspect a lot of self-interest.
It really depends a lot where you live. From what I heard, France kept to the intent of the EU regulation. Not raising prices, giving everyone everything for the same price. In Germany, for example, I have heard that many subscriptions also will lose the roaming feature, basically locking people to their home country.
I am not happy at all with this regulation. Especially, that the EU Commission conceded to the telcos on many things and basically made roaming worse or more expensive for low-usage people. You can't even escape, as they made sure "permanent roaming" isn't allowed. I can't get a Polish SIM and use it permanently here in Luxembourg.
Do note that I can't even escape to other operators nationally: they all have equally bad conditions. Some even much worse than my current one. For now I negotiated with my current operator to get the 27€ plan with a 55% discount for one year. So, I hope the markets normalize and I'll have better choice in 12 months. That is just a slim hope and I suspect I'll have to start paying the insane rates in a year.
Perhaps, I'll just go to a pay as you go plan, with roaming pay as you go. That is allowed in the regulation, just not if you have packages. I'll lose data then. Data is extremely expensive with pay as you go.
The worst part is that any first year economy student could have explained these consequences to them... I can't believe that they didn't have economic advisers on their overpaid panels.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
You're an angry closeted gay Republican who enjoys big black cock and is ashamed of it.
This is not a question of simple economics you make it out to be as it involves little or no actual increase in costs to the telcos, as most of them operate across the EU anyway, just as separate companies from one group. With this they merely take a loss in premium revenue, of course they could always put prices up to try and recover that but potential competition makes that scary. So what to do? Well there is one way to save money, consolidation and that was the EU's plan to begin with.
The EU don't really care about roaming as such, it's the principle of a single common market for selling services that they want. Right now if I buy from Amazon in the EU the majority of goods are being legally sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L a consolidated entity for most of Amazon's EU sales. By contrast if I get a cellular contract in the EU I have to go to a different company in each country. By killing roaming the EU is actually trying to entice companies to merge their operations across countries and sell across the entire single market.
Roaming costs will get moved into a different user fee.
There are no real reasons for roaming fee nowadays except to fill the pockets of the providers.
At worst situation for the service provider, he needs to interconnect with another provider.
As most modern telephone back-end use voip (usually SIP), there aren't that many extra costs compared to a home call, and a cell tower is still a cell tower, no matter which country you're in.
At best for the service provider, it's the same parent company in both countries. The client isn't really roaming, he's just using 2 different local presence of the same parent company (e.g.: O2 is present in several EU-members countries. But it's still considered roaming if you're on O2 Germany, and calling from O2 Czech republic, etc).
So in other words, there's almost no justification for you to pay more than a few percents above what communications rates are at the local operator to which you're roaming while traveling in this country. (if it costs xxx eurocents for operator yyy to take a call for residents of a EU-country, it doesn't cost much more for the same operator to take the same call for somebody coming from abroad).
But until recently, operator had the habit to jack up prices by an insane factor when roaming (when travelling abroad, in a not so distant past, you'd be prepared to pay between 4x and 10x what the locals pay for their calls).
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