back to article Euro ministers ditch plan to ban roaming charges

Europe’s telco ministers appear to have done a U-turn over a proposed total removal of mobile phone roaming charges by the end of the year. In 2013, the European Commission proposed a plan - backed by MEPs - to end costly roaming surcharges by the end of 2015. No longer would holidaymakers or business travellers be surprised …

  1. WonkoTheSane
    Devil

    I smell lobbyists

    Lobbyists with manilla envelopes

    1. Richard 81

      Re: I smell lobbyists

      "Thankyou [...]. However in the future, I would prefer a nondescript briefcase to the sack with a dollar sign on it."

    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: I smell lobbyists

      There is a problem, though. The phone companies undoubtedly make lots of money from roaming charges, since the actual costs of providing roaming services are small, but if they're prevented from doing so they'll want to make up the costs elsewhere. Domestic calls at 10p/min, roaming at 50p/min? Require them all to be the same and you can be sure that the result will not be 10p/min for all calls.

      Banning all roaming charges may help the folks who roam a lot, but not the (probably majority) of people who rarely leave their home country. If there's a real market demand for this, the market will provide, as 3 seems to be doing.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I smell lobbyists

        Hmm you say that it is not possible without raising charges but you acknowledge that Three do exactly that and as they are trying to buy O2 I would suggest that they can't be doing too badly?

        You can pay £17 ($26) to get unlimited data, unlimited sms, 200 minutes voice calls, 4GB tethered use per month and use it all for no extra charge while roaming in many countries including outside the EU. Even getting unlimited call minutes for £13 more.

        When a phone company thinks it is reasonable that people may come home to a £4000 bill because they used data the same abroad as at home then they should be regulated.

        1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

          Re: I smell lobbyists

          Hmm you say that it is not possible without raising charges but you acknowledge that Three do exactly that

          No, I said that the phone companies won't want to lose the money, not that it wasn't possible. Clearly 3 see a business advantage in doing so at the moment. If it's enforced by legislation so that everyone has to make the prices the same there may be less interest for one company to stand out. It's the general danger with trying to legislate things like this, you don't always get the results you want. Bureaucrats unsurprisingly see more legislation as the solution to every problem. It usually isn't.

          1. Danny 14

            Re: I smell lobbyists

            like most things in life it is spread across the entire business model. do you really think every customer uses their 3000 minutes and 6000 texts per month? Highly unlikely. The "feel at home" with three is probably a reciprocal agreement as it isn't with all providers in respective countries. Personally I thought it was great when I was in france (and a minor bugbear in Belgium as they aren't covered). Previously I had used a €30 holiday sim, something I didn't need to this year.

            Three would still stand out as even if there was a cap on roaming, three effectively have no roaming in quite a few countries. Plus even if there is no "roaming" the telcos can still say roaming doesn't come out of your package allowance and simply increase std charges (shafting PAYG)

          2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

            Re: I smell lobbyists

            "Bureaucrats unsurprisingly see more legislation as the solution to every problem. It usually isn't."

            Free market capitalism is almost never the solution to anything either. Regulated markets are. Free market capitalism is a dangerous religion, nothing more. It should be treated like any other cult.

        2. Alpha Tony

          Re: I smell lobbyists

          'When a phone company thinks it is reasonable that people may come home to a £4000 bill because they used data the same abroad as at home then they should be regulated.'

          I agree.. If by 'regulated' you mean 'tarred and feathered'.

  2. RISC OS

    I'm guessing

    That too many MEPs realised that they had shares in to many companies that would be affected by the change... wait a minute, I need a period of time to adjust to the change in my dividends.

    1. Fancypants

      Re: I'm guessing

      I don't think you can have read the story. This isn't MEPs being greedy it is national governments bending down before the corporate interests (again). The MEPs are the ones who want to keep the ban on roaming charges.

    2. Matt 21

      Re: I'm guessing

      The article says this came from the council of ministers (telecom reps) and not MEPs. MEPs had said they support getting rid of roaming charges (according to the article).

      So it looks like ordinary MPs (ours included) were lobbied and bribed to keep roaming charges.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm guessing

        > The article says this came from the council of ministers (telecom reps) and not MEPs

        And the actual communication linked to in the article comes from the European Commission, actually.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I'm guessing

          So they sent the message, so what? It was the ministers who are reported as being the source.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: what a rip-off

      Actually not. You are tunneled back to your original GGSN. You _CAN_ be reassigned to a local serving GGSN, but you are not. This is done on purpose to justify high charges.

      It is the same with voice. Theoretically - a roaming mobile is assigned a temporary number. A call to that mobile is routed to the temporary number instead. So if someone is calling you from the local country their operator in theory can get the temporary number via SS7 signalling from your operator and short-circuit the call. So the call is local instead of to your home country and back. It was in there in GSM 3GPP spec from the first release to support roaming. It is also indicative that it was never ever implemented by anyone as would have removed the technical justifications for half of the roaming rip-offs.

      In any case - as far as "same as domestic packages" - they are making me laugh. All of the suspects - Voda, O2, 3, etc have a daily cap on roaming and will charge you above that. That cap depending on your package can be as low as 25MB. I would not call that "same as domestic consumption". Not even close.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: what a rip-off

        "You are tunneled back to your original GGSN. You _CAN_ be reassigned to a local serving GGSN, but you are not. This is done on purpose to justify high charges."

        My understanding is that it's done to comply with the law on recording your Internet activity. For another telco to record that information, one you don't have a contractual relationship with, you would have to give your informed consent under the data protection act.

        " All of the suspects - Voda, O2, 3, etc have a daily cap on roaming and will charge you above that."

        My O2 account doesn't. It's unlimited, with the caveat that it will slow down if I use too much in one day. On holiday last year I used it myself and my wife's phone, my son's iPad and our au pair's phone were all tethered to it without seeming to reach that limit. Cheaper than the hotel's WiFi by far.

    2. theblackhand

      Re: what a rip-off

      Re:Larry F54

      Voice a "just" a streaming data service to a single destination at a time (apoloiges to any voice guys I upset...).

      i.e. a mobile call from UK to France at full rate is likely to be equivalent to listening to streaming audio from a French website at 13Kbps. In all liklihood, the voice call will use less data and cost much more than if you choose to use a VoIP service to replace the voice call.

      Just because there is a flat fee for Internet doesn't mean that all the different parts along the line don't get paid. For voice traffic, there has been a long history of service accounting, so it is charged accordingly.

  4. Dazed and Confused
    Happy

    Oh well

    3mobile here I come then.

    I was in Austria a couple of weeks back, the Mrs and the kids got free roaming and a great signal, I was on Vodafone who charged me a few quid a day for an unusable connection.

    Contract up for renewal later this month.

    Guess it's time to let market forces kick in.

    1. Hellcat

      Re: Oh well

      My roaming in France on 3mobile didn't work. Called their support number from my wife's Voda but no matter how many times I selected the required network it failed to connect. So no calls or data plus nearly an hour of holiday wasted.

      The second I drove into Switzerland *BING* text message "Welcome to Switzerland, feel at home with no data charges". Same for Italy and then later Austria. I switched roaming off while driving through Germany and Belgium, and the gremlins must have been evicted by the time I got back to France as it worked perfectly.

      For anyone who regularly visits any of the covered countries it's a real plus. I'd go SIM only next time though - they're not the fastest to get updates out to their locked handsets.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Oh well

        > My roaming in France on 3mobile didn't work

        Roaming in France with any company is totally hit and miss (well, at least based on my sample of five foreign SIMs, so far)

        In fact, even French SIMs aren't that great in France, for some reason. Maybe the antennas going on strike or something.

    2. Billa Bong

      Re: Oh well

      I'm still on contract with O2 until September, but I have a PAYG sim on 3 to use when traveling. The difference is a tenth the cost or less.

      O2 charge £6 per meg, max £40 but also max 50MB, 3 give you data roaming for £10 up to 250MB (or 1G for £15). Call costs are "as at home" on 3, including free for incoming, O2 is nothing short of piracy IMO.

      Can't wait for September.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Corin

      Re: single market?

      AAISP Sip2Sim perhaps?

    2. Dazed and Confused
      Unhappy

      Re: single market? my AR*E

      There is a single market for people who can afford lobbyist, it doesn't apply to us.

      A few years back Nintendo had decided that the number 1 marketing tool in the UK was to create a scarcity. Every Christmas it's the same, some toy manufacture hypes up their wares and then tells the press that there won't be enough to go around. Suddenly all the kids want one. So UK has no Wii consoles (well apart from the warehouses full but we mustn't talk about those). So hop on the the Amazon site for France, not problems with getting a Wii but as soon as you put in a UK shipping address - NO Can't deliver to that address. Try Germany same story. Try giving an address in France to the German website, no problems, UK address NINE!

      So I put in a complaint to the EU commission and was told that they felt that Nintendo were allowed to do this if they wanted, even though I'd pointed out that car makers had been fined €Ms for doing the same type of thing.

      Nope consumers don't count

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: single market? my AR*E

        I've never found that a problem. However, I don't think there's a law which requires them to ship to every European country. You could of course just go to Germany and buy one. The single market means no-one can stop you or tax you more than a local buying the same product.

        You could get someone like WatchDog involved and try and shame Amazon into shipping all items to the UK.

      2. Robin

        Re: single market? my AR*E

        > So hop on the the Amazon site for France, not problems with getting a Wii but as soon as you put in a UK shipping address - NO Can't deliver to that address.

        Weird, I did exactly that to get a DS and it worked fine. Maybe they thought I was buying a Citroen and didn't realise til it was too late?

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: single market? my AR*E

        as soon as you put in a UK shipping address - NO Can't deliver to that address. Try Germany same story. Try giving an address in France to the German website, no problems

        It might be nice to think it's a conspiracy, but in fact it's nothing to do with that, or with artificial shortages. Try ordering UK electrical equipment to an address in France, same story. The reason is somewhat more prosaic, France and Germany use compatible mains plugs, which are not compatible with the UK system.

        UK legislation forbids the sale of equipment which does not have a UK plug, or a suitable conversion plug (not an adaptor) attached. Other countries have similar rules. Amazon will not ship an appliance with a non-UK plug to the UK or vice-versa (I've tried, for commonplace objects).

        Although I haven't tried it, I would expect the same problem to show up when ordering from Amazon France to Italy, or vice-versa, since Italian plugs are also different, as are Swiss, etc.

  6. DropBear

    Fine, the carriers can have their way...

    ...and become relegated from service providers to infrastructure providers, merely a link in the chain, while virtual operators eat their lunch. Guess who's the one around here who offers almost EU-wide access for practically no surcharge? The bloody cable TV company, who - due to their coax being the only cabling in place in people's homes past the ye olde telco's copper wire pair - became the de facto (and only one available) ISP when the times changed, then later on started offering mobile services without owning a single cell tower anywhere, when the times changed again. Back then they were almost giving away for free landline connectivity with your cable TV package, then almost free Huawei mobiles with your internet subscription, then a complimentary 3G data access USB dongle too. The result? Nobody has a proper landline anymore (but many have the ISP's IP-based surrogate) and there's a slow but steady exodus from all other mobile providers to the ISP's next-to-free covers-all-EU plans. Just sayin'...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I can see free roaming being a problem. Imagine if hordes of users bought a "Broadband replacement" subscription in one of the countried where the operators have built networks that can handle that. 20E per month without usage caps, fair use clauses or throttling. If they then hook up their entire home LAN/wlan on that connection, abd if thousands of users do the same in a locale where operators are still using data caps or fair use caps measured in gigabytes, like a place like, oh say UK, we'd be looking at total network meltdown...

    Does the foreign operator pay the UK operator the ludicrous UK going rates for data, thus ending up forced to raise their rates in foreignland, to levels where they can't compete with the fixed line providers anymore? Thus foreignland broadband coverage would go from 97% to 60% with the loss of wireless broadband.

    Or alternatively, if the UK operator gets payed the foreignland rates for data, it will find my itself unable to invest i its network, it will have to charge even higher prices from its domestic users, which will increase the number of roaming users, which will make the problem even worse, ensuring UK wireless never improves.

    Seems to me that until every operator is playing the same game, free roaming will be a bit unfeasible.

    [Full disclosure: As someone who helped start a fibre ISP in a part of foreignland with no fixed line service, I'm all in favour of the first option, wreck the wireless so we get monopoly-like hold of the local market, and more customers without having to put in any effort, whee!]

    1. Samuel Penn

      Presumably there will be limits, similar to what Three have. You have a lower data limit when roaming (25GB), they don't allow tethering and you can only do it for 3 months a year.

      1. Pigro

        A 3G router (and changing user agent to a mobile browser client on any PC you connect) gets around the tethering issue, and allows all mobiles to share the one SIM data plan. I didn't know about the 3 month limit though - do you have a link to any info on that? I use a 3 PAYG SIM for regular trips to my place in Italy; those trips are cumulatively around 11 weeks per year, so just under the limit you mention - but I thought I'd read the T's & C's pretty carefully and all they said was that the free roaming was intended for occasional use, and that where 3 suspected excessive, exclusively foreign usage they reserved the right to suspend or bar the SIM. I never saw any hard limit of x days, weeks or months per year ... but the terms have changed since I did my research 3 years ago??

  8. John 98

    The minutes, please!

    This is what comes of letting a gang of politicians hide in a smoke filled room. About time these meetings were in public and minuted so we can all see who got a brown envelope.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The minutes, please!

      @ John 98; I'm pretty sure what the politicians are doing there is highly illegal.

      Everyone knows that smoking indoors is against the law nowadays.

  9. naive

    Lobbyists proved their worth for every penny

    Not surprising for those who are acquainted with the Euro-quarter in Brussels. For each of the buildings where European institutions are housed, there is another one full with little brass nameplates of lobbyists. Paying roaming for telecom services in an European market that is controlled by multinational companies, it sounds like a joke.

    Perhaps good news for apple and google, since it would create an incentive for them to start selling telco provider independent sims.

    But it also shows the state of Europe, if there would be one example to show the average citizen that EU could do anything useful besides introducing a slowly decomposing currency and paying up for failed states like Greece, then this would be it.

  10. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Ain't over yet

    This is very eleventh hour and, therefore, a bit late. My network started eliminating roaming charges last year and any company that doesn't have a strategy to survive the wholesale rollout next year is not going to survive anyway. Most of the industry has already prepared for the change (billing systems don't usually get changed overnight). More changes mean more disruption which a mere two-year extension of the existing rules is unlikely to make sufficiently attractive.

    The ministers can decide what they want, they'll still have to go back to the parliament to get it approved. If no agreement can be reached in time (and that's possible) then existing provisions will apply. The proposed changes are, therefore, merely a bargaining chip for talking to the parliament. In the meantime more and more consumers will continue to educate themselves on how to make the best of the situation. I, for one, am not going to hold my breath on this one.

  11. Lallabalalla

    Corporations own our lawmakers

    Why else would voda be let off £4 BEEELION (as elreg would have it) in tax, and be allowed to continue this roaming charge nonsense?

  12. Mr C
    Unhappy

    shame on you

    “EU member states should hang their heads in shame,”

    this. so, so, SOOOO much this

  13. Anonymous Blowhard

    More details please

    "the council of national telecoms ministers"

    Which specific Ministers? I'm assuming this was a meeting of national telecoms ministers, so which ones decided to pull the plug on this?

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not u-turn, EU-turn.

  15. Chris G

    This Weeks' special offer

    Free phone use for life and a villa on the beach of your choice.

    Offer only applies to non voting ministers.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think we can all see that Mr Backhander put in a showing. especially with the business tariffs we're being hit with. Business tariffs are usually about ten years behind consumer tariffs for data and costs.

    50meg roaming data per month, 200meg if I authorise instigation of the £100 "heavy user" tariff for that user while they're abroad. after that its £6 a meg. (I was interested to note a 300meg download = £1800)

    my other option is to know before the user leaves the home network, and pay £120 to give them 1gig of roaming data just for that month, but that only enables for the user if they are on the local network, IE before they leave when I ask for it.

    the last chance saloon is to buy a 1gig daily data pass, for something like a tenner, but it's only valid for 24 hours.

    when I have people in the states for two, or three weeks at a time I regularly see monthly per user bills in three or four figures. you can spot the ipad activations on the "byod but the company bought it for you" plan, as it usually weighs in at around 2+ grand that month in data charges.

    your consumer tariffs mean sweet eff ay to the carriers. its the business accounts that pay.

    in my case it probably isn't all the carrier whose name ends in "2"'s fault, but more than likely my useless vendor liaison manager who needs a swift brick to the temple. Mr Backhander probably at work there too.

    anon. for the obvious.

  17. This post has been deleted by its author

  18. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Meanwhile in Canada...

    The mobile carriers in Canada are just-now implementing "Extended Coverage", whereby if you're outside the range of your own carrier's tower, then perhaps you can get access through the competition's tower.

    Essentially a series of roaming agreements *between competitors* (gasp!) and *within* (gasp!) a given single market. It means that the residents of Canada can now have cellular coverage almost as good (use any tower) as that enjoyed by visitors to Canada.

    PS: It was essentially forced by the government regulator, the CRTC.

  19. PaulR79

    In 2013 ............. end costly roaming surcharges by the end of 2015.

    <snip>

    .............national representatives now argue that “a transitional period is needed to allow roaming providers to adapt to wholesale market conditions”.

    2 years isn't enough of a transitional period? What a joke this has become.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Of course...

    People could stop using their mobiles for shata (Shit data) that they are so accustomed to using it for at home. Do the vast majority of people really need data services on -all- the time? No. Is it really worth getting hit with roaming charges just to browse FB? No.

    There will always be exceptions, but for the most part data charges incurred for roaming fees are based on people not adapting their habits to the terrain, so to speak.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Which Draft Regulation???

    The EC's (not council of ministers!) communication repeatedly mentions a draft of a regulation that has, apparently, been sent to the European Parliament (plus a bunch of others), but at no point gives a clue as to the number or name of the regulation, nor is a link offered to it.

    What the fuck's going on?

  22. crayon
    WTF?

    "Presumably there will be limits, similar to what Three have. You have a lower data limit when roaming (25GB), they don't allow tethering and you can only do it for 3 months a year."

    Looking at their website, it says you can't tether whilst roaming, but apparently you can use mobile wifi, so what's the difference? If they're capping your data at 25GB then however you use it (whether by tethering or via mobile wifi - which is effectively the same) shouldn't matter.

  23. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Once upon a time - roaming from Canada into the USA

    Roaming telephone calls were affordable at about $1 a minute. Quick phone call, maybe $3. Who cares?

    Roaming data was $0.05 per kilobyte. Looking at CNN.com would cost $37. Seriously... ...$37. Horror stories of uninformed people getting home to find cell phone bills of $45,000.

    Now they've got a Roam Like Home deal of $5 per day. $5 a day. Use your phone as if you were at home. Who cares?

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