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Am I the only on that thinks this is a bit of an overreach? Seems to me, good justifications for legislating would be -If customers were being tricked into pa

• masklinn 13y ago
  > Am I the only on that thinks this is a bit of an overreach? Not a all. Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange completely agree with you. > Instead, the state interest according to Kroes is that it's an "irritant." The state interest is the people's interest. Roaming charges are not in the user's interest: 1. It's very easy to be hit by roaming charges in Europe if you're not careful, many countries can be gone through in an hour or three and since Schengen moving across borders has become an habitual past-time. 2. The charges are not fair and not about costs these days, they're about free money, notice how the operators which have issues with that are present or have partnerships in pretty much all of the EU? A roaming user doesn't cost them much, but it earns them a lot. 3. Roaming charges are especially problematic with modern "always connected" smartphones, forgetting to disable data roaming (if you can even do so) is common, and the charges for data roaming are completely crazy.
  • rmc 13y ago
    If you live near a border, and the 'foreign' network mast is closer than your 'national' one, and has a stronger signal, you might be 'roaming' while at home.
    • mcv 13y ago
      That should definitely be illegal.
      • masklinn 13y ago
        Sadly electromagnetic waves are not very handy at lawbooks.
        • mavhc 13y ago
          The universe cares little for your beliefs, and even less for your laws
        • rsynnott 13y ago
          A phone can discriminate towards low signal strength cells of network A vs high strength cells of network B. Of course, the key word is 'can'; due to a lack of standardisation this will often fail to work properly for particular models.
        • mcv 13y ago
          That's why you don't tackle this at the electromagnetic wave level, you tackle it at the operator level. Or maybe at the phone level. Shouldn't the phone be able to recognize and prefer a local cell over a foreign one? I mean, why does my phone prefer the crappy network that I have my crappy subscription with over the much stronger networks of the competitors? Why would this stop working when I'm near the border?
      • Kliment 13y ago
        Friend of mine lives 400m from a border. He has to call his cell provider monthly to contest the roaming charges he gets charged every month for using his phone at home. So far they've removed them every time.
  • mason240 13y ago
    >Not a all. Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange completely agree with you. Of course they do, they already have near continental wireless coverage. The small carriers don't. This would obviously lead to no more roaming at all, which run the small carriers out of business and creates a huge barrier for entry to new carriers (as the would need a huge network before even launching your service).
    • rsynnott 13y ago
      Current regulations already cap wholesale (telco to telco) roaming pricing, and new regulation should improve this.
    • aestra 13y ago
      No they wouldn't. They would pay the same roaming rate as everyone else does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati...
• TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  read the other posts. Most operators are present everywhere, it's just free money for them without any justification - that really hinders users in the process.
• felxh 13y ago
  I agree that the best scenario would be one carrier simply dropping roaming charges and other carriers eventually following suit, because of market pressure. However, the fact that this hasn't happened makes me suspect that carriers are mutually agreeing not to drop roaming charges since it is such a big cash cow for them. I have no evidence for this, though. (didn't down vote you btw)
• benilov 13y ago
  There is monopolistic/market manipulating behaviour going on - it's basically an oligopoly, and the barrier to entry into the mobile telecoms market (ie building your network) is only growing.
  • aestra 13y ago
    How so?
    • noselasd 13y ago
      It is _amazingly_ expensive to start building a network. There's about 4 vendors providing the gear needed for a large scale cell network. And they're not bothering talking to you unless you want to buy a lot of gear. Then you need spectrum licenses. And since you're placing cell towers around, you're either going to rent rather expensive towers, or build your own, which requires permits and a lot of civil engineering. It's a bit easier today, as there's more infrastructure in place - but you may very well end up needing to provide the network backhaul from a cell site, somehow get power lines to the cell site. And that cell site might need backup power, which require refueling and maintenance every now and then, you might need to build a small cabin to house the gear, and you might need to hire helicopters to fly in that gear. When you get this far, you need a marketing department, so people can actually buy connectivity, refill cards, sim card distribution, and similar. At some point you might need roaming agreements with others as well. If your're lucky the government requires you to have agreements with other operators in your country - important enough, cause unless you have greate coverage people won't bother if they can't use their phone. If you want your customers to use their phone while abroad, you get to make individual roaming agreements with all those other operators in other countries.
• tonyedgecombe 13y ago
  -If there were monopolistic / market manipulating behaviour going on. If the market was operating efficiently roaming charges wouldn't be so high. They are high which discourages use and so is a drag on the whole economy (apart from the telcos). If we left everything to the free market we would have the same problems the US has with it's telecoms infrastructure. Communications, just like other utilities are too important to the economy for governments to ignore.
  • ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Well, let's be precise here. The EU changes, like many EU changes are intended to create a "free market". It's not possible to have a free market without some level of government support (e.g. courts, contracts, regulations about externalities etc.). With utilities it's particularl crucial due to network effects. The telecom situation in the USA, much like their healthcare, is not messed up because it's a free market, it's messed up because governments, under the guise of creating a free market, introduce absolutely brain-dead regulations that achieve the exact opposite of a free market and the corporations take advantage of that to gouge consumers, free from worries about competition because it's not a free market.
    • yxhuvud 13y ago
      Strictly speaking, the EU changes is to create a common market, not a free market. There is a big difference between those two poles.
• marceldegraaf 13y ago
  I didn't downvote but would like to comment either way. I think this is exactly something the EU should be doing. The EU is largely about breaking the borders between all these smaller countries and making trade and travel between these countries easier for EU members. Although the ease of trade and travel have certainly improved massively (no more need for passport controls, one currency for the Union), I think these mobile roaming costs are actually quite a big problem. In the current situation, as a customer, when I'm on holiday in another EU country I have three options for using my iPhone on the go: 1) Shelling out for roaming costs, which are expensive, extremely untransparent, and seem very arbitrary. What are these costs for? Who determines what the right price is? 2) Buying a SIM-card in the country of my destination, which is cheaper but also prevents me from using my own phone number while abroad 3) Not using mobile data at all and hoping for free WiFi at my hotel or in the nearest village (which is what I do) Removing roaming costs altogether means I can freely drive to France for a two-week holiday and use Google Maps or check my email on my iPhone, all within my normal data bundle, without the risk of getting a bill of a few hundred Euro.
• DasIch 13y ago
  Communication has become so essential to daily life, that having access to communication networks is as import as having access to water or electricity. Communication has become infrastructure, some might argue a human right and that changes the rules that apply to it. Letting providers do as they want without restraints does not create desireable outcomes, as can be clearly seen right now. So it's necessary to apply some restraints that do create those desireable outcomes.
• CaptainZapp 13y ago
  (off topic) I re-upvoted you. I utterly disagree with your reasoning, but downvoting HN contributors for having a different opinion should really be beyond us and there's nothing in your post, which warrants downvoting.
• Jacqued 13y ago
  To me the ineptness of the practice seems to be reason enough. For anyone who travels, it really is a hassle in 2013 to have to put everything digital in your life on hold and stop relying on your smartphone just because you are moving around inside of Europe. Given how small the oligopoly of those companies is, and how they charge roaming fees even when you are still using their own network (only it's another subsidiary in another country), roaming fees seems to me like a case of distorted competition.
• solistice 13y ago
  I come from the German-Swiss border, and roaming charges can be a total PITA over here. If you have your phone with roaming enabled (and most people do), and you come too close to the swiss border (which happens on the train line down the Rhein river), your phone will repeatedly switch from the German network to the Swiss network and back. Even if you have an all-germany flatrate, you will get milked over here.
• henningb 13y ago
  I don't think it is overreach even if it is a rather strong market regulation. The EU has the responsibility to tear down economic borders inside the EU. Just like you don't have to pay import tax when buying stuff from another EU country, you should not have to pay roaming charges. Obviously the better solution would be the free market takes care of that by itself. It didn't. And there are no signs of it happening. So the EU regulation is a pragmatic solution.
• jakobe 13y ago
  > If customers were being tricked into paying roaming charges in nefarious ways If your phone rings abroad, and you don't pick it up, and the call goes to voicemail, they charge you for an incoming call and for an outgoing call. Even if the caller doesn't speak on your voicemail, you are billed at least 1 minute active + 1 minute passive. Assume you're an Austrian, and you miss 3 calls while in Montenegro, that's 20€ in unexpected charges.
  • adrinavarro 13y ago
    Huh? Then there's something wrong with your operator. Roaming charges are for the "international" segment: from home, to the country you are, and from the country you are to home. That's why you pay extra to make calls, and that's why you get to pay when you receive calls. But it's also "opt-in": you only pay for what you accept. You won't pay for SMS because you can't elect to receive them or not. And, if you miss, or reject a call, it goes to your voicemail. And the voicemail is in your country operator's. So, of course, you won't pay. Unless you have a weird phone and the voicemail is in your phone. Then turn off your weird mobile phone.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      That voicemails are not subject to roaming charges within the EU is a quite recent thing, and I'm not sure if it's a result of regulation or if the operators have just pre-empted being forced to do it. When roaming outside of the EU, you can still expect to get hit with massive charges for receiving voicemail. It's result of a quirk of how voicemail calls get routed: If you set up call diversion to your voicemail with your network, you'd not pay anything. But if you fail to answer, or divert calls to voicemail with your phone, the calls would get routed to the network your phone is active in, you'd fail to answer, and the call would get routed back by the operator you're roaming with, rather than having that operator somehow just signal that the calls should be diverted at source, and you'd get to pay for the pleasure. At least that's the excuse the operators used. Of course it was particularly shitty that they'd charge people extortionate rates due to shortcomings of the way they do call routing.
      • 13y ago
• tiatia 13y ago
  "If customers were being tricked into paying roaming charges in nefarious ways;" Like, living on the border and your phone checks into the wrong side of the border and you get billed 1000nds? Tricked like that?
  • aestra 13y ago
    It must suck cellphone-wise if you lived in one country and commuted daily to work into another. I'm sure that with the EU, and the ability to freely live and work within other EU counties, there are people who do that. (Disclaimer: I don't live in Europe)
• rsynnott 13y ago
  Essentially, roaming charges are of benefit to nobody but a small number of large telecoms. They hurt the consumer and they hurt business. Removing them will not cripple the telcos. > If there were monopolistic / market manipulating behaviour going on. In practice, with few exceptions, before the regulation started (remember, the EU already sets roaming price caps), there was a form of cartel system, at least informally; prices were pretty much standard and extremely high.
• colomon 13y ago
  Here's my question. Every comment I read here seems to assume that the roaming charges will be eliminated and that is that. Isn't it more likely the companies will raise prices elsewhere to compensate for the lost revenue?
  • justincormack 13y ago
    I think everyone would prefer that. Basis ally now a few people pay a lot and most people try to avoid using the product as it has high unpredictable pricing versus the normal fixed monthly cost. A revenue neutral solution would be better.