Europe Cuts Mobile Roaming Charges, But it Becomes Free in 2017
The price of making a call, sending a text or surfing the Internet (Mobile Broadband) from your mobile phone while roaming abroad within Europe has today dropped another level following last year’s regulatory changes (here) and the extra charges will be completely removed from 15th June 2017.
Sadly the agreement to end mobile roaming charges for those travelling between EU member states (France, Germany, UK etc.), which means that while roaming you’d simply continue to pay whatever you do today for your existing domestic (home) tariff, won’t be introduced for another year. But until then we do at least benefit from another discount.
The cost of EU roaming has come down hugely in recent years and from today it will fall again, with the maximum surcharge (this is added to your domestic rate) that mobile operators can levy dropping to €0.05 +vat (£0.04) per minute for outgoing calls, €0.01 (£0.01) per minute for incoming calls, €0.02 (£0.02) per text and €0.05 (£0.04) per MegaByte of data.
As before mobile operators are also required to impose a monthly cost cap on data of €50 +vat, although subscribers can optionally go above this via a specific request. This feature exists to help stop consumers being surprised by unexpected BILL SHOCKS, which is something that we’ve seen a fair few times in the past.
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 Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
« A Few More Details on BT’s Ultrafast Bradford FTTP Broadband Trial
Comments are closed.
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your comment content, display name, IP, email and / or website details in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
NOTE 1: Sometimes your comment might not appear immediately due to site cache (this is cleared every few hours) or it may be caught by automated moderation / anti-spam.
NOTE 2: Comments that break our rules, spam, troll or post via known fake IP/proxy servers may be blocked or removed.
Wonder what would happen if we do Brexit? 🙂
It would depend on what the parting terms are. In the case of this roaming charge change, three countries outside the EU are included (Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein). The EU has a special economic relationship with these countries. If we assume that the any negotiations on separation are on a rational basis, then there seems no reason why this sort of thing could not continue.
Now there’s a thought…
…politicians being rational! 🙂
As is usual you need to read what is NOT said rather than what is.
On PAYG, O2 are introducing a new fixed rate daily charge whenever you use the phone on any given day when abroad – whether this is just a single call or umpteen texts and data.
Previously the fixed charge only was applied when you used data.
So now you get reduced £/min call rates BUT an addition of a fixed charge on top.
So the net overall effect for a light user is that the cost of these calls is going up and making a single call during a given day is going to be a bad idea as it’s going to cost ya.
Thanks for nothing EU.
Vote leave
Alternatively O2 PAYG customers text NOTRAVEL to 23336 to opt-out of the daily charge and just pay the 4p/minute for calls they actually make.
Or switch networks.
It’s not the EU’s fault – it’s O2’s… so voting leave will make no difference to the corporate greed that prompted O2 find a way around EU regulations – ones that actually benefit us, not the opposite.
Why do they always do this AFTER I get back from my European holidays??
Maybe we could club together and pay for your next few holidays.
Imagine how quickly the telecoms market would advance then!
So Three have been providing us with this for two years and also provide access to some international countries. We regularly use our plan in the US without extra charges.