Clarifying O2 UK’s Tougher Excess Data Charges for EU Roaming

Mobile operator O2 (VMO2) appears set to introduce a tougher Fair Usage Policy (FUP) for data (mobile broadband) usage when roaming around the EU. From 2nd August 2021, Pay Monthly customers will now be charged £3.50 for every GigaByte of data used over a cap of 25GB. But this is not a new approach.

According to the Independent, the operator sent the following message to several customers: “As your monthly UK data allowance is over 25GB, you can still use your data in our Europe Zone. But it’s now subject to a Roaming Limit of 25GB. Once you’ve reached this limit you’ll be charged an additional cost of £3.50/GB.”

Suffice to say that this has caused some concern, particularly after EE (BT), O2, Three UK and Vodafone all promised they had “no plans” to make changes post-Brexit (here). The Government also introduced some limited protection against the risk of BILL SHOCKs by adding a legislated cap of £45 on roaming charges and related warnings (first proposed in 2018).

However, the EU-UK Trade Agreement doesn’t guarantee such a position for the future, but it did contain “measures to encourage cooperation on the promotion of fair and transparent rates for international mobile roaming. It also covers obligations on net neutrality, which fulfils the UK’s dual aims of securing commitments towards an open internet and protecting the safety of users online,” said the Government in December 2020.

Naturally, a number of newspapers have thus described O2’s change as the “end of free roaming” or the “return of roaming charges,” but it should be said that data usage when roaming within the EU has always tended to be treated a bit differently from texts and calls, even when the UK was still within the EU. Indeed, O2’s rivals have long had fair usage limits, particularly for UK plans that offer unlimited data or large data allowances.

For example, EE’s Pay Monthly plans already include a 50GB roaming cap when within their own Europe Zone (i.e. if you have a usage allowance of that size or bigger) and “surcharges” will apply if you go over that (here) – this equates to 36p per MegaByte. It’s a similar story for other operators’ too, with Three UK enabling you to use up to 20GB of your data allowance at no extra cost when within their Go Roam in Europe destinations.

An O2 Spokesperson said:

“Less than 1 percent of our Pay Monthly customers reach anywhere near 25GB during occasional travel to Europe. If a customer’s UK monthly data allowance is over 25GB, from August 2 they will have a Roaming Limit of 25GB when roaming in our Europe Zone.

This means they can use up to 25GB of their allowance at no extra cost – we’ll text them if they get close to the limit, and again if they reach it. A customer can still use data if they reach our Roaming Limit, but will be charged £3.50/GB.”

In short, O2 are largely just adopting the same approach as their rivals, which have long had FUP caps on data for EU roaming. The reason for this goes all the way back to the EU’s original launch of their “Roam like at Home” policy in 2017 (here), which recognised that there would be some problems with data roaming because domestic charges for data varied significantly between countries.

In order to balance against such issues, the EU introduced a restriction, which meant that the eligible amount of data would be determined by operators in terms of the wholesale roaming price cap. This is the maximum price operators can charge each other for the data their consumers use abroad (currently about €3/GB in 2021 and then €2.5/GB in 2022). Operators have thus tended to translate this into a specific cap, as per above.

In practice this only really hits mobile plans with bigger or unlimited data allowances, but it’s nothing new for the industry and that’s the key point. Admittedly, it probably won’t feel like that if you’re an O2 customer and previously enjoyed a more flexible approach.