Roaming charges drop smacks O2 daddy Telefonica in the profits Operating profit at Spanish telco Telefonica - owner of UK cell network O2 - dropped 1.9 per cent in its third quarter to €4.1bn (£3.6bn), mainly due to the loss of roaming revenue and changes to exchange rates. Revenue dropped 2.5 per cent in the quarter to €12.7bn (£11.3bn), for the quarter. Sales in Blighty were up 1.1 per …
To state the obvious, to benefit from no roaming charges you have to be outside your own location.
UK to UK is within your minutes.
France to France, Germany, or UK is within your minutes.
UK to France will cost you bigtime.
My son has Vodafone Red, pay monthly. They charge £1.50 per minute from UK to Ireland but Ireland to UK doesn't cost as it's roaming and within his minutes.
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From Vodafone's website
Calls to Europe from the UK £1.50 a minute (inc. VAT)
Calls to our Rest of World zone from the UK £2.00 a minute (inc. VAT)
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giffgaff charge 2p landline and 5p per minute to phone Ireland.
"Chief reckons biz did well despite 'negative impact' of EU regs"
Maybe this was because they basically didn't deliver the expected service: O2 admits to throttling network bandwidth for EU data roamers
...so yeah, that'll help. And also brazenly patting him|her self on the back for it too. Profit, profit, profit... and screw the customers.
O2 are in the process of losing some customers though due to a recent knee-jerk reaction to this - they're dropping their "TU Go" app.
In short, TU Go allowed users such as myself to make/receive calls and texts via Wifi - kind of useful if you live in the North of Scotland in an area with lousy mobile coverage. Also handy abroad as well. Feedback on their forums to this decision has been less than brilliant it has to be said.
Given this, I'll likely be cancelling my O2 contract within the next month and moving to either EE or Three, seeing as they do cover my home a bit better, and Three do have much better call/text over Wifi options available.
Not only that, you could put a SIM from another network in your phone, eg when you are outside the EU, and continue to make/receive calls on your O2 line. You pay O2 as if you are in the UK, plus whatever the local provider charges for data.
None of the others do that. The Three app only works if you are in the UK and have a Three SIM in your phone.
4G Wifi calling, which you can do on all networks with a supported handset, again only works in the UK, and if you have that network's SIM in your phone.
OK, maybe I missed something in the email, but aren’t they removing the Tu Go app because the phones now have it native in the OS? I know the iPhone does, and I’m fairly sure more recent Androids do too.
Doesn’t help if you’re on an older device, but then I’m not aware of comparable Apps on other networks for WiFi calling either.
O2 have invested quite a bit of cash in getting VoLTE and VoWifi working, and also working well (they did it a bit later than Voda and EE because they wanted to get it right) - so if you have a modern handset that supports Voice over Wifi, in that case, you don't need TuGo, it's a little redundant. In that case it does it natively in the handset. When you enable VoWifi it disables TuGo as you can only have one or the other enabled on your MSISDN.
The one big benefit of TuGo was being able to have it installed on an iPad or another phone and use that if your phone dies / is stolen / is out of coverage. It was a huge USP and if it is being upgraded for whatever reason, they must have a replacement on the way, I'm sure.
I'll stick with o2 who have never charged me the purchase cost of my phones beyond the contract date but dropped to service charge only. Who refunded all my wife's charges for calls from America when she got stranded because they were delayed in sending the unlatching PIN so she could use an American SIM for her phone. Who wiped a bill for being outside Europe due to a footprint while in Greecce. Who forgot to send out a notification back in the early days that free tethering was finishing so they wiped a bill for over a £1k and gave users a month extra so they could find an alternative. Who have never knowingly overcharged me for anything and a simple phone call has always sorted things out.
I know people who are using phones that are more than 5 years old and still being charged the purchase price of the phone.
is 4G roaming. Voda and EE do roaming 4G but O2 still do not. Even when you're on O2.de it's still stuck on 3G which is a pain.
To be fair, also, roaming was a huge cash cow, and still is for most of the networks. The cost of providing roaming to their customers is pretty flat - and not a huge cost in the grand scheme of things. Most of the time roaming charges were/are pure profit, in the main. And especially data roaming which is cheaper to provision than voice.
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