Giffgaff 'roam like at home' package means £1/min calls in Jersey Giffgaff customers may want to think twice before holidaying in tax havens such as the Channel Islands as new roaming charges will hike calls back to Blighty to £1 per minute – up from the current 0.5p rate. From 14 June, the mobile virtual network operator will allow customers to roam in the EU and use their allowances as …
There was also the gotcha that meant using a ferry's own base station can be charged at rest of the world rates as, despite being in the EU (between, say, Dover and Calais), the base station may be registered out of the EU, such as in Norway. I got caught a couple of years ago switching on data roaming while docking at Calais and burned through £20 in a very short time. This was with O2 and I expect the same still applies (also with Giffgaff and probably all the other providers).
if you don't get one then don't use it. Otherwise turn roaming off and back on again, it isn't hard and depends on what risk you have to spending money. I have a very low risk when it comes to mobiles (Go walking in the lakes and you can roam to the isle of man up Scafell Pike for example).
Not true I'm afraid. You can (usually) only get a French network when on the north-east/east coast. My parents visit from Oz occasionally and Telstra have no reciprocal with JT, therefore their phones won't register with the local network. Once, they needed to receive a text with an authentication code - it took
nearly an hour of driving around the north coast in order to connect to a French network.
No not adhering to the rules, using the omissions in the rules to justify a commercial decision.
"A Giffgaff spokeswoman said: "Unfortunately, because the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Monaco and Switzerland are not classed as part of the EU, we cannot include them in our 'Roam Like at Home' offer, and have had to amend the current pricing structure."
The EU rules don't prohibit Giffgaffe from including non-EU members in their "Roam Like at Home" bundle. Additionally, Giffgaffes position requires a rather strict reading of the rules concerning the Protocol 3 countries and the classifying of mobile call handling as a 'service' and not 'goods'.
So the question has to be what has changed to cause Giffgaffe to voluntarily remove non-EEA countries and territories, namely: the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Switzerland and Monaco from it's existing European roaming deal.
Three have no problem with including all those territories in their Feel at Home tariff.
Giffgaff stopped being attractive long ago, rapidly descending into a normal abusive relationship with users. They abandoned any pretence of running a useful PAYG service almost immediately, their bundles were rapidly caught by rolling contracts from everyone else and firmly in the unlimited doesn't mean unlimited camp.
Glad I left years ago when the writing was on the wall.
Last time I was in Jersey (July 2016), Giffgaff appeared on my phone as a MVNO - it looked no different than being in the UK, and was charged at the same rates. The handset didn't think it was roaming.
Is this all a storm in a teacup, and only applies if the handset roams onto JT instead of picking up the MVNO?
Of course, it's possible that Giffgaff no longer appears as MVNO in Jersey.
This post has been deleted by its author
1. Buy large weapon
2. Blow foot off.
Seriously GiffGaff, was the small increase in income worth the bad publicity and ridicule? Was this cleard at the highest level? If so I'm glad I don't own shares in the company if they can be this dumb.
ps. Just checked. GiffGaff despite selling itself a company run by its users is actually owned by Telefonica, which also own O2 which in turn is the parent network for the GiffGaff MVNO. Given what's been going on with Telefonica /O2 recently, this change seems consistent.
pps. Norway, Iceland etc are also not in the EU. What about calls to from them?
selling itself a company run by its users
To be fair, its technical support is run but its users - but that seem like absolute crap. Fortunately, they don't run the network, but it does seem to operate on a shoestring (which is why there was so much downtime a while ago when the billing system went TITSUP) which would probably explain the penny-pinching.
Norway etc are part of the EEA and as such are within the scope of EU Roaming Regulations 2017.
The Channel Islands, Switzerland and the Isle of Man are technically not part of either the EU or the EEA and so don't have to be covered by Roam Like Home for any given operator.
Some operators are going to include them in their scope and others aren't - it's purely a commercial decision.
I know this because I've spent the last 6 months working on designing and implementing a rather neat rating solution.
They don't have to charge for those destinations, they choose to. All of them - apart from Monaco - are on Three's list of Feel At Home destinations. A service they offered long before the EU forced the other operators to follow suit.
A word of warning though to anyone travelling on a ferry or near a coast: neither Roam Like Home nor Feel At Home include the Maritime Network, which is quite expensive to use. Your phone may connect to it without warning. As I discovered the hard way.
If you want to receive calls on your usual number while abroad, and not have to remortgage your house to pay for them, get an O2 account, install the TuGo app, and put a local SIM in your phone. O2 will charge you for using the TuGo app as if you were in the UK, ie no charge for incoming calls, and the local provider will charge you for the data the TuGo app uses.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
