10 ms·

European roaming charges will end in 2014

286 points by morganwilde 13y ago

marban 13y ago
The article misses the fact that telcos are about to raise prices locally in return. Personally, I welcome this step since plans are cheap as hell in most countries anyway compared to, say, the US.
- netrus 13y ago
  Not sure about that, it has not happened after the last few price-limitations that were issued in recent years. If mobile internet is 50-100x more expensive beyond national borders I will simply not use it, it's a lose-lose deal (that is hard for the market to escape from, due to the large fragmentation).
  - mmahemoff 13y ago
    The telcos make a small fortune every time a business traveller runs up thousands of Euros/Pounds/etc (often at the expense of their employer's shareholders). It's not surprising if the telcos increase everyone's fees a bit if this money is no longer coming in. And I'm fine with that. Overall, it means previously underutilised capacity will finally be used. 99% of people were unable to use all mobile broadband when abroad, despite it being cheap and abundant. Now they can.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      I read somewhere in some other coverage of this reform that the measures were expected to drain about 2% from telcos' revenues. Even if they raise their prices by 5% (which isn't given), that's (a) still a decent deal if you travel ever (but unfair that non-travellers would end up subsidising travellers) (b) quickly eaten up by the continuously falling prices of mobile plans.
      - tveita 13y ago
        "subsidising travellers"? If anything the travellers must be subsidising the non-travellers now. A couple of megabytes of data do not cost hundreds of dollars to move just because you have to route through one more network.
- ValentineC 13y ago
  That's true. I believe providers exchange significant amounts of money from multilateral roaming agreements, and all that potential profit has to come from somewhere else. What I'd like to see are providers charging a low fee for travellers to use their networks. Local users will subsidise travellers less in this case.
- icebraining 13y ago
  If they can raise them (without lowering the number of calls), why haven't they done so by now?
netrus 13y ago
This has huge psychological implications, similar to not carrying a passport while crossing borders and paying with the same coins everywhere: All these measures help to get the feeling that Europe is indeed one place, one community. Weekend trips to other countries are not a privilege of the 1 percent over here, more like the top 30-50%. I love to see what is happening right now, and I'm confident it will survive any current crisis. Maybe without the UK, but continental Europe is sufficient great for me ;)
- morganwilde 13y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, this is bigger than the freedom of physical movement within the EU country borders. Now our data will move with us!
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I don't think I'd go that far! It's an added convenience, but my data already moves with me through the EU, since non-phone internet access (coffee shops, libraries, McDonald's, 7-11, hotels, etc.) is pretty widespread.
    - skrause 13y ago
      It seems that you haven't traveled to Germany yet. Public Wifi is barely available because of legal risks and hotels still try to charge you something like 10 euro for a day of internet access. When I went to Dublin in Ireland the situation was almost as bad.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        Interesting; I indeed haven't traveled to Germany. The internet situation has been pretty good in the eight European countries I've been to recently, though: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France. In a number of them the government even provides easy-to-find free internet (any library in Paris or Copenhagen, the main public spaces of Helsinki or Heraklion, and so on).
casca 13y ago
This is still at the very high-level discussion stage. The key phrase: "“They agreed that this time next year we will have got rid of these charges,” a Brussels source said" Also, it's not clear how this would be implemented. For example, Vodafone in the UK lets you pay £3 a day and use your calls, texts and data from Europe. Would that be acceptable? What happens to the smaller MVNOs who have been responsible for driving down prices who now need to make a whole lot of roaming agreements? Given that data is regularly more useful when roaming than calls, will this directive require free data roaming too or is it excluded? If I was a pan-European mobile operator, I'd have been lobbying for this. It will cost them very little to provide the service, mostly some modifications to their billing system. For those operators that only have national presence, they'll need to start making alliances and integrate systems with other operators in countries they're unfamiliar with in a different language. Original article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/10119159/EU-to-end-mobile-roaming-charges-next-year.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol... (Edited to make clearer why a pan-European operator would support this)
- amirmc 13y ago
  > "If I was a pan-European mobile operator, I'd have been lobbying for this." Do you mean lobbying against this? If I were a pan-european operator, then I'm making 'free' money from my customers that travel across Europe with negligible increase in costs. Scrapping roaming charges means that advantage goes away. Indeed, the article you link to has the following: "The plans set up a clash between Brussels and telecoms bosses such as Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao, who in February called for a 'moratorium on regulation' in telecoms. He said industry had been a target for too long and it threatened employment. Neelie Kroes, the Commisisoner behind the reforms, told Mr Colao she would 'call your bluff'" Other than that, your questions are interesting. I'm on an MVNO (GiffGaff), which uses the O2 network. It'd be great if deals that the parent networks make are simply passed onto the MVNOs but we'll have to see.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  I'm under the impression that I would be able to use my plan from one country in another without regard for whether I'm actually roaming or not, for no extra cost. This would include data, and would be excellent for me (at the moment at least) considering I have a cheap unlimited data plan. I've seen it stated elsewhere that one of the ambitions of this plan is increased competition across borders, for example, operators from, say, the UK could compete with operators in the Netherlands.
davidw 13y ago
I wonder if prices will be transparent enough and 'equalized' enough that you might even be able to shop around for the cheapest country to get a number in.
quattrofan 13y ago
How can this happen? the Daily Mail tells me nothing good comes from membership of the EU!!
- marcosscriven 13y ago
  No doubt the 'Mail will be able to spin it in some convoluted manner to look like another example of 'immigrants' stealing our jobs/money. No idea how, but they will.
  - ovi256 13y ago
    Well, it's pretty simple. Consolidation of telcos will lead to less C-level executive jobs, less Network Operation Center jobs, less network architecture and planning jobs, so there you have it, this measure can only destroy jobs.
    - phillc73 13y ago
      I'm pretty sure the Daily Mail will gleefully inform us that as we're all likely to use our mobile phones in Europe a lot more after this change takes place, we'll all have cancer.
      - marcosscriven 13y ago
        OMG you're right, the immigrants gave us cancer too! Pesky immigrants.
        saraid216 13y ago
        Dirty. Immigrants are supposed to be dirty.
      - quattrofan 13y ago
        I like it, so headline "EU Mobile phone directive causes brain tumours and raises unemployment"
marcosscriven 13y ago
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Now, as a European citizen based on a little island called Great Britain, I just hope our short sighted little-Englander politicians don't pull us out of the European Union.
- Bosence 13y ago
  I highly doubt they will, there's too much to lose. They're just bluffing hot air to win over support from UKIP/BNP voters.
Luc 13y ago
There's a hundred operators in Europe, whereas there's three or four in the US and China. This fits in Neelie Kroes' plan to drive consolidation among operators.
- raphman 13y ago
  Have such plans been announced/alleged? As far as I know, there are only a handful, multinational operators with own cell tower infrastructure. The rest are more or less just resellers.
  - Luc 13y ago
    From a year ago: "M&A could help telcos close Europe's network gap: Kroes" http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-media-tech-summit-kroes-idUKBRE85A12A20120611 http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-media-tech-summi...
  - krzyk 13y ago
    I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Poland we used to have 3 mobile operators, each one with their own cell towers, right now we have 4, but two of them have been bought by international comapnies (tmobile and orange).
oleganza 13y ago
To make it clear: we all were paying roaming charges not because "evil companies" arranged in a cartel, but because some politicians (who control telecom licenses) were deciding prices and rules. Now they decided to drop some requirements and we all fell warm and happy about it. Does anyone wonder, wouldn't it be better if Brussels didn't have such power in the first place?
- amirmc 13y ago
  Can you expand on this? I don't see how politicians were deciding anything about roaming charges in Europe.
- netrus 13y ago
  So an American in Singapore or South Africa does not have high roaming costs? I'm not sure that's true. They have established maximum prices, not minimum.
- moreentropy 13y ago
  [citation needed]
- Atropos 13y ago
  You are either horribly misinformed or simply trolling. The reason MAXIMUM roaming charges are set by Brussels is that the competition in the telecommunications market EU wide is not working. The main reason for that is a particular market structure: In most countries, landline telecommunication service was provided by the government, and the operators only later being privatized. The now private company could in a way free-ride on the original investment made in the infrastructure by the government, which is why an attack on the market by foreign companies is difficult. Furthermore the telecommunications industry has very strong network effects, so that the dominant natural provider could even be a sort of natural monopoly. The licences for example for 3G/4G networks are mostly offered in a public bidding contest in most EU countries, so the state intervention is quite minimal. Unless you are suggesting government should have nothing to do with it at all, and every operator should simply use any frequency he desires and let's see what happens? Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_on_roaming_charges_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_on_roaming_charges_... to see how bad the situation was before EU intervention!
lettergram 13y ago
I get the feeling that this will raise the prices significantly and likely keep fragmentation (it's harder to compete when all companies have the same possible pool).
yread 13y ago
The EU already severely regulate the market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_regulations#Prices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg... In fact it was sometimes cheaper to call on roaming then to call for the price-per-minute after you use up all your plan. Not to mention the data
- gutnor 13y ago
  I don't know for the data, but I pay 8 times less (! 25p/min vs 3p/min) to call a mobile in foreign country than another mobile locally in the UK and only 2 times cheaper when making call in a foreign country. I never really understood, that's just a pay as you go sim from a big player, yet it is cheaper to call a Spanish mobile in Spain with my UK mobile than the Pay as you Go rate from the same operator in Spain.
bad_user 13y ago
This is great, but I fear that the big winners will be the big telcos that have a presence in multiple countries, like Vodafone or Orange. In my country these two companies formed an oligopoly with similar services, similar prices, similar everything, until Cosmote came along.
belorn 13y ago
This will most likely not happen. European Parliament member Christian Engström has written on the subject that this decision is just one in a row of promised proposals to lower/get rid of roaming charges. He points out that each time an actual proposal has been created, it has immediately been dropped by the same group. The current proposal is intended to be created just at the time the current European Commission's term will be up and next commission can "decide" on the matter. http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/article16919673.ab http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/article16919673.ab
- alemhnan 13y ago
  I've actually a different experience so far. For example in 2009 they flattened the price of sms [http://www.telecoms.com/10693/europe-cuts-costs-of-sms-data-roaming-charges/ http://www.telecoms.com/10693/europe-cuts-costs-of-sms-data-...].
Aardwolf 13y ago
Awesome, because the times when I especially need mobile internet is when in other European countries!! Currently the solution is to buy a local simcard.
Pxtl 13y ago
I'm going to go ahead and assume that, once this is complete, you will be able to go to one country and buy a phone, then use it to make a call from a second country into a third... and probably still pay less than the average Canadian local cellphone call.
d2vid 13y ago
Are international calling fees within the EU going away as well?
pbiggar 13y ago
Unrelated, but it's interesting how they describe the European Commission as being "a group of 27 politicians who represent the best interests of Europe as a whole, rather than individual countries". I normally hear them described as "a group of unelected bureaucrats". I guess perspective changes when they're doing a good thing, instead of being complained about.
return0 13y ago
It's about time, the charges are exorbitant and clearly not justifiable. Imagine if americans, had to pay roaming charges whenever they drive to a different state.
jamesjguthrie 13y ago
This is awesome! Agree with the others here saying that in the UK we kinda feel like we're outsiders/special/loners but I think this is completely daft and I'd love to have better integration with the mainland.
tehwalrus 13y ago
I've always hated roaming charges, especially within Europe. This is WIN.
Carwajalca 13y ago
Some operators already offer flat rate packages for several countries. E.g. my operator the Finnish-Swedish TeliaSonera offers me unlimited data, calls and sms for Fennoscandia (fi, se, dk, no) and the Baltic countries.
Dj_Anthony2013 13y ago
This is good news for me because my job entails traveling a lot mostly within eu.
akavel 13y ago
Sounds great as described here, but I do have some doubts as to this being only good and awesome: - If this was done with current prices, then I imagine people would rush to buy plans in the cheapest countries. Which sounds like big loss to telcoms. So, will they raise prices? If yes, this means problems for people in those cheap countries, who usually earn less too. Or will telcoms maybe lock-in prepaids to your personal ID, to enforce pricing-per-country? But then, anonymity is lost. So maybe, maybe they might introduce both as options, so you either pay more ("euroglobal price") for anonymity, or less and provide your ID? Any other ideas, anyone? - "will mean greater competition, leading to alliances and eventual mergers" - I'm not economist, but isn't "greater competition" like exactly opposite to "alliances and mergers"?
CarlHoerberg 13y ago
Nice, then maybe I can get rid of some of the ~20 SIM cards I'm carrying around, and not having to research the mobile market for each new country I happen to pass by..
skion 13y ago
This proves again that Neelie gets it.
laacz 13y ago
I know I'm late to the comment party, but my two eurocents. In EU it's no longer an issue to talk or message abroad even when roaming. Since last roaming cap was introduced voice and messaging has become relatively cheap. What's most welcome about this (if it will go forward becoming mandatory) is the possibility to get data abroad, which is VERY expensive right now even with offerings from Europe-wide carriers.

286 points by morganwilde 13y ago

The article misses the fact that telcos are about to raise prices locally in return. Personally, I welcome this step since plans are cheap as hell in most countries anyway compared to, say, the US.

netrus 13y ago
Not sure about that, it has not happened after the last few price-limitations that were issued in recent years. If mobile internet is 50-100x more expensive beyond national borders I will simply not use it, it's a lose-lose deal (that is hard for the market to escape from, due to the large fragmentation).
- mmahemoff 13y ago
  The telcos make a small fortune every time a business traveller runs up thousands of Euros/Pounds/etc (often at the expense of their employer's shareholders). It's not surprising if the telcos increase everyone's fees a bit if this money is no longer coming in. And I'm fine with that. Overall, it means previously underutilised capacity will finally be used. 99% of people were unable to use all mobile broadband when abroad, despite it being cheap and abundant. Now they can.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    I read somewhere in some other coverage of this reform that the measures were expected to drain about 2% from telcos' revenues. Even if they raise their prices by 5% (which isn't given), that's (a) still a decent deal if you travel ever (but unfair that non-travellers would end up subsidising travellers) (b) quickly eaten up by the continuously falling prices of mobile plans.
    - tveita 13y ago
      "subsidising travellers"? If anything the travellers must be subsidising the non-travellers now. A couple of megabytes of data do not cost hundreds of dollars to move just because you have to route through one more network.
ValentineC 13y ago
That's true. I believe providers exchange significant amounts of money from multilateral roaming agreements, and all that potential profit has to come from somewhere else. What I'd like to see are providers charging a low fee for travellers to use their networks. Local users will subsidise travellers less in this case.
icebraining 13y ago
If they can raise them (without lowering the number of calls), why haven't they done so by now?

netrus 13y ago

This has huge psychological implications, similar to not carrying a passport while crossing borders and paying with the same coins everywhere: All these measures help to get the feeling that Europe is indeed one place, one community. Weekend trips to other countries are not a privilege of the 1 percent over here, more like the top 30-50%. I love to see what is happening right now, and I'm confident it will survive any current crisis. Maybe without the UK, but continental Europe is sufficient great for me ;)

morganwilde 13y ago
As far as I'm concerned, this is bigger than the freedom of physical movement within the EU country borders. Now our data will move with us!
- _delirium 13y ago
  I don't think I'd go that far! It's an added convenience, but my data already moves with me through the EU, since non-phone internet access (coffee shops, libraries, McDonald's, 7-11, hotels, etc.) is pretty widespread.
  - skrause 13y ago
    It seems that you haven't traveled to Germany yet. Public Wifi is barely available because of legal risks and hotels still try to charge you something like 10 euro for a day of internet access. When I went to Dublin in Ireland the situation was almost as bad.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      Interesting; I indeed haven't traveled to Germany. The internet situation has been pretty good in the eight European countries I've been to recently, though: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France. In a number of them the government even provides easy-to-find free internet (any library in Paris or Copenhagen, the main public spaces of Helsinki or Heraklion, and so on).

casca 13y ago

This is still at the very high-level discussion stage. The key phrase: "“They agreed that this time next year we will have got rid of these charges,” a Brussels source said" Also, it's not clear how this would be implemented. For example, Vodafone in the UK lets you pay £3 a day and use your calls, texts and data from Europe. Would that be acceptable? What happens to the smaller MVNOs who have been responsible for driving down prices who now need to make a whole lot of roaming agreements? Given that data is regularly more useful when roaming than calls, will this directive require free data roaming too or is it excluded? If I was a pan-European mobile operator, I'd have been lobbying for this. It will cost them very little to provide the service, mostly some modifications to their billing system. For those operators that only have national presence, they'll need to start making alliances and integrate systems with other operators in countries they're unfamiliar with in a different language. Original article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/10119159/EU-to-end-mobile-roaming-charges-next-year.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol... (Edited to make clearer why a pan-European operator would support this)

amirmc 13y ago
> "If I was a pan-European mobile operator, I'd have been lobbying for this." Do you mean lobbying against this? If I were a pan-european operator, then I'm making 'free' money from my customers that travel across Europe with negligible increase in costs. Scrapping roaming charges means that advantage goes away. Indeed, the article you link to has the following: "The plans set up a clash between Brussels and telecoms bosses such as Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao, who in February called for a 'moratorium on regulation' in telecoms. He said industry had been a target for too long and it threatened employment. Neelie Kroes, the Commisisoner behind the reforms, told Mr Colao she would 'call your bluff'" Other than that, your questions are interesting. I'm on an MVNO (GiffGaff), which uses the O2 network. It'd be great if deals that the parent networks make are simply passed onto the MVNOs but we'll have to see.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
I'm under the impression that I would be able to use my plan from one country in another without regard for whether I'm actually roaming or not, for no extra cost. This would include data, and would be excellent for me (at the moment at least) considering I have a cheap unlimited data plan. I've seen it stated elsewhere that one of the ambitions of this plan is increased competition across borders, for example, operators from, say, the UK could compete with operators in the Netherlands.

davidw 13y ago

I wonder if prices will be transparent enough and 'equalized' enough that you might even be able to shop around for the cheapest country to get a number in.

quattrofan 13y ago

How can this happen? the Daily Mail tells me nothing good comes from membership of the EU!!

marcosscriven 13y ago
No doubt the 'Mail will be able to spin it in some convoluted manner to look like another example of 'immigrants' stealing our jobs/money. No idea how, but they will.
- ovi256 13y ago
  Well, it's pretty simple. Consolidation of telcos will lead to less C-level executive jobs, less Network Operation Center jobs, less network architecture and planning jobs, so there you have it, this measure can only destroy jobs.
  - phillc73 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure the Daily Mail will gleefully inform us that as we're all likely to use our mobile phones in Europe a lot more after this change takes place, we'll all have cancer.
    - marcosscriven 13y ago
      OMG you're right, the immigrants gave us cancer too! Pesky immigrants.
      - saraid216 13y ago
        Dirty. Immigrants are supposed to be dirty.
    - quattrofan 13y ago
      I like it, so headline "EU Mobile phone directive causes brain tumours and raises unemployment"

marcosscriven 13y ago

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Now, as a European citizen based on a little island called Great Britain, I just hope our short sighted little-Englander politicians don't pull us out of the European Union.

Bosence 13y ago
I highly doubt they will, there's too much to lose. They're just bluffing hot air to win over support from UKIP/BNP voters.

Luc 13y ago

There's a hundred operators in Europe, whereas there's three or four in the US and China. This fits in Neelie Kroes' plan to drive consolidation among operators.

raphman 13y ago
Have such plans been announced/alleged? As far as I know, there are only a handful, multinational operators with own cell tower infrastructure. The rest are more or less just resellers.
- Luc 13y ago
  From a year ago: "M&A could help telcos close Europe's network gap: Kroes" http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-media-tech-summit-kroes-idUKBRE85A12A20120611 http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-media-tech-summi...
- krzyk 13y ago
  I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Poland we used to have 3 mobile operators, each one with their own cell towers, right now we have 4, but two of them have been bought by international comapnies (tmobile and orange).

oleganza 13y ago

To make it clear: we all were paying roaming charges not because "evil companies" arranged in a cartel, but because some politicians (who control telecom licenses) were deciding prices and rules. Now they decided to drop some requirements and we all fell warm and happy about it. Does anyone wonder, wouldn't it be better if Brussels didn't have such power in the first place?

amirmc 13y ago
Can you expand on this? I don't see how politicians were deciding anything about roaming charges in Europe.
netrus 13y ago
So an American in Singapore or South Africa does not have high roaming costs? I'm not sure that's true. They have established maximum prices, not minimum.
moreentropy 13y ago
[citation needed]
Atropos 13y ago
You are either horribly misinformed or simply trolling. The reason MAXIMUM roaming charges are set by Brussels is that the competition in the telecommunications market EU wide is not working. The main reason for that is a particular market structure: In most countries, landline telecommunication service was provided by the government, and the operators only later being privatized. The now private company could in a way free-ride on the original investment made in the infrastructure by the government, which is why an attack on the market by foreign companies is difficult. Furthermore the telecommunications industry has very strong network effects, so that the dominant natural provider could even be a sort of natural monopoly. The licences for example for 3G/4G networks are mostly offered in a public bidding contest in most EU countries, so the state intervention is quite minimal. Unless you are suggesting government should have nothing to do with it at all, and every operator should simply use any frequency he desires and let's see what happens? Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_on_roaming_charges_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_on_roaming_charges_... to see how bad the situation was before EU intervention!

lettergram 13y ago

I get the feeling that this will raise the prices significantly and likely keep fragmentation (it's harder to compete when all companies have the same possible pool).

yread 13y ago

The EU already severely regulate the market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_regulations#Prices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg... In fact it was sometimes cheaper to call on roaming then to call for the price-per-minute after you use up all your plan. Not to mention the data

gutnor 13y ago
I don't know for the data, but I pay 8 times less (! 25p/min vs 3p/min) to call a mobile in foreign country than another mobile locally in the UK and only 2 times cheaper when making call in a foreign country. I never really understood, that's just a pay as you go sim from a big player, yet it is cheaper to call a Spanish mobile in Spain with my UK mobile than the Pay as you Go rate from the same operator in Spain.

bad_user 13y ago

This is great, but I fear that the big winners will be the big telcos that have a presence in multiple countries, like Vodafone or Orange. In my country these two companies formed an oligopoly with similar services, similar prices, similar everything, until Cosmote came along.

belorn 13y ago

This will most likely not happen. European Parliament member Christian Engström has written on the subject that this decision is just one in a row of promised proposals to lower/get rid of roaming charges. He points out that each time an actual proposal has been created, it has immediately been dropped by the same group. The current proposal is intended to be created just at the time the current European Commission's term will be up and next commission can "decide" on the matter. http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/article16919673.ab http://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/article16919673.ab

alemhnan 13y ago
I've actually a different experience so far. For example in 2009 they flattened the price of sms [http://www.telecoms.com/10693/europe-cuts-costs-of-sms-data-roaming-charges/ http://www.telecoms.com/10693/europe-cuts-costs-of-sms-data-...].

Aardwolf 13y ago

Awesome, because the times when I especially need mobile internet is when in other European countries!! Currently the solution is to buy a local simcard.

Pxtl 13y ago

I'm going to go ahead and assume that, once this is complete, you will be able to go to one country and buy a phone, then use it to make a call from a second country into a third... and probably still pay less than the average Canadian local cellphone call.

d2vid 13y ago

Are international calling fees within the EU going away as well?

pbiggar 13y ago

Unrelated, but it's interesting how they describe the European Commission as being "a group of 27 politicians who represent the best interests of Europe as a whole, rather than individual countries". I normally hear them described as "a group of unelected bureaucrats". I guess perspective changes when they're doing a good thing, instead of being complained about.

return0 13y ago

It's about time, the charges are exorbitant and clearly not justifiable. Imagine if americans, had to pay roaming charges whenever they drive to a different state.

jamesjguthrie 13y ago

This is awesome! Agree with the others here saying that in the UK we kinda feel like we're outsiders/special/loners but I think this is completely daft and I'd love to have better integration with the mainland.

tehwalrus 13y ago

I've always hated roaming charges, especially within Europe. This is WIN.

Carwajalca 13y ago

Some operators already offer flat rate packages for several countries. E.g. my operator the Finnish-Swedish TeliaSonera offers me unlimited data, calls and sms for Fennoscandia (fi, se, dk, no) and the Baltic countries.

Dj_Anthony2013 13y ago

This is good news for me because my job entails traveling a lot mostly within eu.

akavel 13y ago

Sounds great as described here, but I do have some doubts as to this being only good and awesome: - If this was done with current prices, then I imagine people would rush to buy plans in the cheapest countries. Which sounds like big loss to telcoms. So, will they raise prices? If yes, this means problems for people in those cheap countries, who usually earn less too. Or will telcoms maybe lock-in prepaids to your personal ID, to enforce pricing-per-country? But then, anonymity is lost. So maybe, maybe they might introduce both as options, so you either pay more ("euroglobal price") for anonymity, or less and provide your ID? Any other ideas, anyone? - "will mean greater competition, leading to alliances and eventual mergers" - I'm not economist, but isn't "greater competition" like exactly opposite to "alliances and mergers"?

CarlHoerberg 13y ago

Nice, then maybe I can get rid of some of the ~20 SIM cards I'm carrying around, and not having to research the mobile market for each new country I happen to pass by..

skion 13y ago

This proves again that Neelie gets it.

laacz 13y ago

I know I'm late to the comment party, but my two eurocents. In EU it's no longer an issue to talk or message abroad even when roaming. Since last roaming cap was introduced voice and messaging has become relatively cheap. What's most welcome about this (if it will go forward becoming mandatory) is the possibility to get data abroad, which is VERY expensive right now even with offerings from Europe-wide carriers.