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Europe abolishes mobile phone roaming charges
- eitally 11y agoHopefully this will peer-pressure US carriers to follow suit.
- Delmania 11y agoUnlikely, if anything, the US carriers will double down on roaming fees. They tend to do whatever it takes to prevent becoming what the European carriers have become, just a line supplier.
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoI do not know, how the US carriers fare, but the "just line suppliers" of Europe and particularly of Germany are faring very, very well! They still make tons of money for sometimes lowest-level service. Of course, when you have much, you still can fare better and make even more profits ...
- rconti 11y agoSeems like the very existence of roaming fees indicates that the European carriers were behaving very much like US carriers. Why would US carriers double down on roaming fees? I don't see how it's in any way related to this.
- dmishe 11y agoThere are no roaming charges inside of US, are there?
- Maultasche 11y agoThere are no rules against roaming charges, so it depends on the plan. I believe that most plans don't have roaming charges within the United States. Mine certainly doesn't. It's hard to have a competitive plan that has roaming charges. Roaming charges outside the United States can be quite high. I have to watch carefully who I'm connected to when I'm near the Canadian border.
- aeorgnoieang 11y agoThere are; outside of each carrier's coverage. Tho some carriers don't have roaming charges.
- ghaff 11y agoThere can be roaming charges and roaming data caps inside the US although they're not very common with the major carriers. The only time I've specifically encountered a cap with AT&T (I have a grandfathered "unlimited" plan) was when I was in Furnace Creek in Death Valley. (For those not familiar, Furnace Creek is quite isolated but it did get cell phone service a few years back.) As others have said, international roaming is very expensive without a specific plan. I left early on a trip to Europe last winter because of a snowstorm and before I knew it I had a big bill because I had used my phone in Toronto airport and my roaming service wasn't scheduled to begin for a couple of days. Fortunately, AT&T moved the start time for the international service earlier for me.
- Steko 11y agoAFAIK AT&T always lets you buy International plan add ons back to beginning of the current bill cycle. Still a rip. T-Mobile has 'free international data' but it's 2G speeds (capped at 128 kbps) and the upsell is a rip, $50 for half a GB.
- ghaff 11y agoAT&T's system for international add-ons on their site is a lot better than it used to be when you had to explicitly cancel the plan over the phone when you got back home. I'm happy enough with their offerings. I suppose there are circumstances where I'd just buy a SIM card for my old phone when I arrived at the airport, but for most purposes I'm fine with paying $30 for 120MB or whatever it is. It's no hassle and serves my purposes for a week of travel or so.
- hedgehog 11y agoI used the T-Mobile roaming data for a two month trip this year and was really happy with it. It may not be fast but it's pretty useful to have messaging, VOIP, and maps ready to go as soon as the plane lands.
- r00fus 11y agoIn France, TMO free international was phenomenally useful even at 128Kb/s. You can't stream video, but I was able to get some data in the most remote places.
- whoopdedo 11y agoIn the US you still get charged by the minute for "extended local area" on landline plans. So yeah, I'm not holding my breath.
- frandroid 11y agoWell, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's, which is what led to rapid and and widespread adoption of mobile on that continent in the first place.
- whoopdedo 11y agoWhat I was pointing out is there is a lot of inertia that would prevent any telephone company from changing the practice. Particularly since the consolidation of mobile carriers means most people rarely are in a roaming area.
- seszett 11y ago> Well, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's Wait... what? Bell used to charge me more for a basic landline in Montreal than I paid for 20Mpbs internet + free unlimited international calls + a hundred TV channels or so in France. The historical operator's plan for bare landline was cheaper as well. That was back in 2007 so maybe things have changed, but from my experience landline costs in Canada were hugely more expensive than in France. I actually ended up using my parents' VoIP account (provided on the aforementioned plan) to call Canadian lines most of the time because it was cheaper than using my phone. Perhaps generalising "North America" and "Europe" just doesn't work in this case, though.
- adventured 11y agoWho is paying roaming charges in the US on any of the major carriers? I've used both AT&T and Verizon and haven't had to worry about roaming charges for a decade.
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoThe newest news says, that the first big carrier is looking for legal ways to get around this. So "abolish" might be a little to much promise. The news behind the news is, that the EU parliamentarians likely did sacrifice net-neutrality to get rid of the roaming charges (it is rumored, that many feared that when the whole package was not voted for fast, the roaming charges would also be dropped from agenda). So, very possible, in the end we get nothing of it at all!
- kuschku 11y agoWell, they didn’t sacrifice net neutrality. They created net neutrality, but ISPs can still zero-rate some sites. It’s intended to avoid the Netflix-Verizon issue, but it still allows for unfair competition, although the ECJ already mentioned they would consider that an antitrust violation. So we might end up with a fair result.
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoSome people, and also the inventor of the WWW, do not agree.
- kuschku 11y agoYes. Zero-Rating is bad. But you can’t say they "banned" or gave a "heavy blow to" Net Neutrality. They created a very limited law, that provides some of the protections of Net Neutrality, but most importantly, it creates more competition between ISPs. But, as most of the other protections of Net Neutrality are anti-monopoly laws, the ECJ might end up ruling that, if one combines this law with antitrust laws, these protections are implied.
- PythonicAlpha 11y agoTo which extend Net Neutrality was damaged, is debatable -- and likely we will only see in the future what the net-result is. I can only see for now, that they left dangerous holes in the Net Neutrality case here, which the providers where longing for very much, because they want to use these holes to draw money from it.
- pinaceae 11y agoright now some genious at ATT is calculating the business case for roaming charges between US states. not like the US has anything like the EU commission enforcing rules against corporations. oh man, the billions to be reaped. and hey, how many really travel between states? and aren't most voters against the federal government and for more state-level government? make some GOP doofus to run with it, next step - profit!
- maxerickson 11y agoRoaming in the US only really went away sometime around 2000. I would say the wireless carriers are competing pretty hard right now (what with all the offers to pay $500 to get people off their old plan and huge LTE build outs).
- JoshTriplett 11y agoI can't help but wonder if they solved the underlying problem, or just passed it off to the carriers. If they banned carriers from imposing roaming charges on each other to carry each others' traffic, then that could potentially work; if they didn't, and only banned charging the consumer, then that creates a massive market advantage for the larger European carriers, who can charge the smaller carriers with no way for those smaller carriers to recoup the charges from their customers. The article mentions that that "will require reform of the roaming wholesale market on which national phone operators across Europe trade services between each other.". I'm starting to think that the old joke about XML applies to regulation as well: _____ is like violence, if it's not working, use more until it does.
- contravariant 11y agoYou'd think it wouldn't be mandatory for providers to offer international service at all. But that might leave a few loopholes so I'm not sure.
- seszett 11y agoBoth wholesale rates and retail rates have been regulated for a decade or so now, so larger carriers can't charge smaller ones ludicrous rates.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> Both wholesale rates and retail rates have been regulated for a decade or so now, so larger carriers can't charge smaller ones ludicrous rates. If regulations force the retail rates to zero without forcing the wholesale rates to zero, that's still a problem; either do both or do neither.
- seszett 11y agoWell yes, obviously wholesale rates have always been capped lower than retail rates. Now, I can't really find a precise account of what's going to happen in 2017, but I see no reason to think it will be different.
- jpollock 11y agoWatch out for carriers in low tax EU environments poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam. Particularly if there is any sort of discrepancy between what the carrier pays to terminate a call elsewhere in Europe and what they pay to receive a call.
- peteretep 11y ago> Watch out for carriers in low tax EU environments > poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam That sounds like an ideal situation, although as we've recently seen, companies need to be very careful with: > low tax EU environments as the EU has shown itself willing to declare these illegal state subsidies retroactively.
- tormeh 11y agoThose were special tax deals for special companies. It's perfectly legal to just set a low tax rate, as long as it's universal.
- gambiting 11y agoThere's already plenty of legislation about this sort of thing, unfortunately. For example you can drive your car from one EU country in any other EU country and your insurer has to cover you bu law(yes yes I know UK insurers only cover you for 60 days or so, which is stupid, but I think that's the UK law letting them do that), but you can't legally buy a car in say France and buy insurance in Germany. Since car insurance can be a lot cheaper in some EU countries than in others, I guess a lot of people would do that(but then again, if a lot of people were in fact doing it, the insurance prices would probably equalize eventually).
- patrickk 11y agoThis is a great situation. I moved from Ireland to Germany, where I was shocked to discover the stingy as f*ck data allowances that many German networks have. Sure, they have LTE everywhere, but what use is that when you are capped at 400 or 500 MB? It's like having a sports car and only being able to drive on a short track. Now I can get a great deal in some other country (perhaps one with a low cost of living), and simply use that, with better service and lower cost.
- nimbix 11y agoBut be careful if you find yourself in Switzerland or Norway. It's easy to forget that those two are not in the EU and that can easily end up costing you a lot. I had a layover at the Zurich airport yesterday and I almost enabled data roaming which I disabled as soon as I left for the US... it was a good thing I checked the carrier text message letting me know that every MB of transferred data will cost me almost 9 EUR!!!
- einarfd 11y agoNorway is part of the EU inner market. So this regulation will be applicable for it as well.
- Aqwis 11y agoI can't imagine that being the fault of anything other than your carrier -- I'm Norwegian, and I don't think I pay any more for roaming (about 0.05 USD per MB) in the EU than EU citizens do. I visited Switzerland a few years back, and I don't remember roaming charges being much higher than in Germany or France.
- omonra 11y agoMy carrier (3 in the UK) includes Norway and Switzerland on the list of countries that already are free to roam. http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home
- lobster_johnson 11y agoI think Three is a bit unusual. They're not doing it because of the EU stuff. I know several people in Norway who use them as their only mobile service provider, by the way, which (being used to roaming fees) I found very surprising. They're cheaper and better than the two Norwegian networks, apparently.
- yitchelle 11y agoLet me understand this, your friends are using 3 (based in the UK) as their service provider while they are living in Norway? Potentially, the abolishing of the roaming laws will open up the European markets for the smaller service providers.
- Newky 11y agoSo from what I understand, this means that when I roam in the United Kingdom on an Irish sim, I get no extra roaming charges, which is great. Does anyone know if this has any effect on calls/texts to other countries?
- paublyrne 11y agoThis is already the case for some carriers, Vodafone (when Passport is enabled) off the top of my head, and also Meteor. Has been the case for some time. There has been an issue with data though, and I'm not sure the new proposal solves that. Also if you have a plan with minutes, they won't be included as minutes while abroad, you'll be charged, but at a standard home rate.
- msh 11y agoRoaming charges in the eu have always been a way to legally rip off the customers.
- visarga 11y agoMaybe they should link the ability to lease spectrum to free roaming as a basic requirement.
- noja 11y agoThe new "fair" rate is 50 EUR per gig! 10 times the normal cost! It's still a rip off.
- de_Selby 11y agoExactly. They aren't banning roaming charges, they are capping them at a rate that is still a rip off.