Study Claims 5 Million Brits on UK Coast at Risk of Accidental Mobile Roaming Charges
A new Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults (weighted to be nationally representative), which was commissioned by Uswitch.com, has claimed that more than 5 million people (9.8%) have seen their phone connect to an overseas network while they were still in the UK, triggering a roaming charge or alert. But 76% of respondents still think this is “impossible” or have never heard of it.
In the past we’ve seen plenty of occasions where people living in certain parts of the UK, such as Dover (Kent) or Sussex, have seen their mobile phones automatically connect to a mobile network in nearby France (i.e. certain atmospheric conditions, in the right location, can make French signals stronger than domestic ones). If you aren’t aware of this occurring, then it can lead to problems with dramatically inflated bills for calls, texts and 4G / 5G data (mobile broadband).
So, on the one hand, we’re highly sceptical of Uswitch’s extrapolation, from an opinion survey, to equate such issues to impacting 5 million people. But the issue itself is in fact very real and quite well-known if you happen to live in such locations, where it may occur. The issue is particularly relevant at this time of year, with 51% of respondents said to be planning a UK staycation this year.
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Some 26% of respondents are planning a staycation in the South West, along the Cornwall, Devon and the Dorset coast, while the Kent coast and South East England follow in second place (13%). Of those who ended up receiving unexpected charges as a result of accidental roaming, some 39% didn’t know they could dispute the charges – and 52% either took no action or paid without questioning the bill.
The reality is that consumers should always contact their mobile operator when something like this occurs, although a refund isn’t guaranteed, but some operators will do it. Providers are already required to alert customers as soon as they start roaming and to take reasonable steps to stop Northern Ireland customers being billed when their phone locks onto an Irish network. But such things are easily overlooked.
However, whether or not you get hit by a charge can depend upon your mobile plan. Some operators and plans include EU roaming by default (e.g. O2, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, iD Mobile, giffgaff, SMARTY and Talkmobile), which negates the impact from most inadvertent roaming connections. But others (e.g. EE, Vodafone, Three UK) often don’t include this as a default feature, although some of their specific plans may still include it.
Consumers with a concern about this could try manually selecting their mobile network (instead of letting your mobile decide), although this can be a bit fiddly. In addition, most mobiles allow you to disable data roaming features (but not calls/texts as this is a core part of how mobile networks work), which is probably a good idea when you’re in one of these locations.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I remember us “being very concerned” about this thing 20 years ago as well and the solution is still the same (which is mentioned in the article). I would expect it to be common knowledge and everyone in the affected area using packages which free EU roaming which completely mitigates this problem.
I had this happening to me every time when visited Dover. I find it quite ironic that networks from France are providing better coverage than the domestic providers.
The ultimate “reasonable measure” for inadvertent cross border roaming is for the networks to just not charge a roaming charge if the connection comes from a “whitelist” of transmitter sites near to the border. They have the data.
The cost to the MNO/MVNO would be small in the grand scheme of things, although there will be some setup and administration costs (as transmitter sites change).
Even better if country regulators would “permissively” license (for free) neighbouring country networks at transmitter sites near to borders, so the signal is not seen as roaming at all. That would be quote a lot of work at for regulators as well as operators to set this up and maintain this.
We could just go back to what we had when we were in the EU – free roaming! Make it happen Andy.
This should be trivial for networks to detect (a straight roam from a UK cell site to one in France with no period in between of no connectivity can’t be anything else), and automate the sending of an SMS with details of how to manually select a network, and suppress any roaming charges.
This is mainly because poor to none UK’s provider network coverage in those places.
Something I’ve had a couple of times is Isle of Man roaming on ferries from Birkenhead (in the UK) to Belfast (in the UK). It’s a domestic UK ferry, so you wouldn’t expect it to be an issue, but it passes close enough to the Isle of Man in the middle of the night that you will generally get a connection to Manx networks. These can be expensive as they don’t come under EU roaming, even on plans that have it.
Last time this happened to me was at South Foreland Lighthouse near Dover but this was 20 years ago & the French operator sent an advisory text when my phone logged to their network. Does this not happen anymore?
I would have thought that the ‘Timing Advance’ setting in the network handshakes should be set to prevent calls being made even if the handsets can attach to the overseas network.
isn’t dover to calais like 50 miles? i’m surprised a mobile mast works that far to be honest.
No only 21 miles, not too much of a step for a mobile mast with a clear line of site especially when you’re up on the cliffs.