Europe abolishes mobile phone roaming charges | Hacker News Reader

Europe abolishes mobile phone roaming charges

theguardian.com

131 pointsnols67 comments

I can't help but wonder if they solved the underlying problem, or just passed it off to the carriers. If they banned carriers from imposing roaming charges on each other to carry each others' traffic, then that could potentially work; if they didn't, and only banned charging the consumer, then that creates a massive market advantage for the larger European carriers, who can charge the smaller carriers with no way for those smaller carriers to recoup the charges from their customers.

The article mentions that that "will require reform of the roaming wholesale market on which national phone operators across Europe trade services between each other.". I'm starting to think that the old joke about XML applies to regulation as well: _____ is like violence, if it's not working, use more until it does.

You'd think it wouldn't be mandatory for providers to offer international service at all. But that might leave a few loopholes so I'm not sure.

Both wholesale rates and retail rates have been regulated for a decade or so now, so larger carriers can't charge smaller ones ludicrous rates.

> Both wholesale rates and retail rates have been regulated for a decade or so now, so larger carriers can't charge smaller ones ludicrous rates.

If regulations force the retail rates to zero without forcing the wholesale rates to zero, that's still a problem; either do both or do neither.

Well yes, obviously wholesale rates have always been capped lower than retail rates. Now, I can't really find a precise account of what's going to happen in 2017, but I see no reason to think it will be different.

Here is a nice overview. Maybe slightly outdated by the latest developments, but the concept of wholesale and retail rates is clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...

But be careful if you find yourself in Switzerland or Norway. It's easy to forget that those two are not in the EU and that can easily end up costing you a lot. I had a layover at the Zurich airport yesterday and I almost enabled data roaming which I disabled as soon as I left for the US... it was a good thing I checked the carrier text message letting me know that every MB of transferred data will cost me almost 9 EUR!!!

I can't imagine that being the fault of anything other than your carrier -- I'm Norwegian, and I don't think I pay any more for roaming (about 0.05 USD per MB) in the EU than EU citizens do. I visited Switzerland a few years back, and I don't remember roaming charges being much higher than in Germany or France.

My carrier (3 in the UK) includes Norway and Switzerland on the list of countries that already are free to roam.

http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home

I think Three is a bit unusual. They're not doing it because of the EU stuff. I know several people in Norway who use them as their only mobile service provider, by the way, which (being used to roaming fees) I found very surprising. They're cheaper and better than the two Norwegian networks, apparently.

Let me understand this, your friends are using 3 (based in the UK) as their service provider while they are living in Norway?

Potentially, the abolishing of the roaming laws will open up the European markets for the smaller service providers.

Bingo. That's why this got through. If there's one thing the EU takes seriously it's the "common market": trying to ensure that companies across the EU can sell equally into all countries.

3 isn't only based on the UK, it's also one of the major carriers in Denmark (3.dk).

edit: according to wikipedia they're a carrier in: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Exactly.

Just took a look. Sadly they do not roam to Germany, as they are oftentimes cheaper (on a first glance) then our local market-players.

So no British data plan for me, sadly.

Danish 3 roams to Germany[1]. You'll need to sweet-talk someone with a residence here into creating a contract for you though.

[1] https://www.3.dk/abonnementer/fordele/3likehome/

Good to know. Thanks a lot.

> those two are not in the EU

Norway and Iceland are in the EEA, and Switzerland has similar trade deals. So, much EU law does apply to them. I don't know if the roaming law does.

It definitely does not apply to Switzerland.

This is in Italian, but Switzerland, Norway and Croatia are included. http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/impresa-e-territori/2015-10-2...

Better use the free WIFI next time (1hour in Zurich airport)

Norway is part of the EU inner market. So this regulation will be applicable for it as well.

The newest news says, that the first big carrier is looking for legal ways to get around this. So "abolish" might be a little to much promise.

The news behind the news is, that the EU parliamentarians likely did sacrifice net-neutrality to get rid of the roaming charges (it is rumored, that many feared that when the whole package was not voted for fast, the roaming charges would also be dropped from agenda).

So, very possible, in the end we get nothing of it at all!

Well, they didn’t sacrifice net neutrality. They created net neutrality, but ISPs can still zero-rate some sites.

It’s intended to avoid the Netflix-Verizon issue, but it still allows for unfair competition, although the ECJ already mentioned they would consider that an antitrust violation.

So we might end up with a fair result.

Some people, and also the inventor of the WWW, do not agree.

Yes. Zero-Rating is bad.

But you can’t say they "banned" or gave a "heavy blow to" Net Neutrality.

They created a very limited law, that provides some of the protections of Net Neutrality, but most importantly, it creates more competition between ISPs.

But, as most of the other protections of Net Neutrality are anti-monopoly laws, the ECJ might end up ruling that, if one combines this law with antitrust laws, these protections are implied.

To which extend Net Neutrality was damaged, is debatable -- and likely we will only see in the future what the net-result is. I can only see for now, that they left dangerous holes in the Net Neutrality case here, which the providers where longing for very much, because they want to use these holes to draw money from it.

Are you a native German speaker? Just asking because of your use of the comma - pardon the otherwise useless comment.

Yes

Watch out for carriers in low tax EU environments poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam. Particularly if there is any sort of discrepancy between what the carrier pays to terminate a call elsewhere in Europe and what they pay to receive a call.

     > Watch out for carriers in low tax EU environments
     > poaching subscribers and then allowing them to roam

That sounds like an ideal situation, although as we've recently seen, companies need to be very careful with:

    > low tax EU environments

as the EU has shown itself willing to declare these illegal state subsidies retroactively.

Those were special tax deals for special companies. It's perfectly legal to just set a low tax rate, as long as it's universal.

There's already plenty of legislation about this sort of thing, unfortunately. For example you can drive your car from one EU country in any other EU country and your insurer has to cover you bu law(yes yes I know UK insurers only cover you for 60 days or so, which is stupid, but I think that's the UK law letting them do that), but you can't legally buy a car in say France and buy insurance in Germany. Since car insurance can be a lot cheaper in some EU countries than in others, I guess a lot of people would do that(but then again, if a lot of people were in fact doing it, the insurance prices would probably equalize eventually).

This is a great situation.

I moved from Ireland to Germany, where I was shocked to discover the stingy as f*ck data allowances that many German networks have. Sure, they have LTE everywhere, but what use is that when you are capped at 400 or 500 MB? It's like having a sports car and only being able to drive on a short track.

Now I can get a great deal in some other country (perhaps one with a low cost of living), and simply use that, with better service and lower cost.

But then you will get a phone number from another country. Will that add additional charge for others to call you?

They are in the EU also ;)

It's mainly data plans I use, Whatsapp/Viber/Telegram and skype over wifi for international calls. Phone calls are a minor thing for me.

> They are in the EU also ;)

I thought they capped just the roaming charges, isn't calling to mobile numbers in other EU countries still (relatively) expensive? My german carrier currently charges 20 times more for those.

As far as I've read that's unchanged. So roaming will be free but calling other numbers won't be. But I guess you'll see that the most popular providers will expand as smaller providers close down.

Roaming charges in the eu have always been a way to legally rip off the customers.

Maybe they should link the ability to lease spectrum to free roaming as a basic requirement.

The new "fair" rate is 50 EUR per gig! 10 times the normal cost! It's still a rip off.

Exactly. They aren't banning roaming charges, they are capping them at a rate that is still a rip off.

So from what I understand, this means that when I roam in the United Kingdom on an Irish sim, I get no extra roaming charges, which is great.

Does anyone know if this has any effect on calls/texts to other countries?

This is already the case for some carriers, Vodafone (when Passport is enabled) off the top of my head, and also Meteor. Has been the case for some time.

There has been an issue with data though, and I'm not sure the new proposal solves that. Also if you have a plan with minutes, they won't be included as minutes while abroad, you'll be charged, but at a standard home rate.

Hopefully this will peer-pressure US carriers to follow suit.

Unlikely, if anything, the US carriers will double down on roaming fees. They tend to do whatever it takes to prevent becoming what the European carriers have become, just a line supplier.

I do not know, how the US carriers fare, but the "just line suppliers" of Europe and particularly of Germany are faring very, very well! They still make tons of money for sometimes lowest-level service.

Of course, when you have much, you still can fare better and make even more profits ...

Seems like the very existence of roaming fees indicates that the European carriers were behaving very much like US carriers.

Why would US carriers double down on roaming fees? I don't see how it's in any way related to this.

There are no roaming charges inside of US, are there?

There are no rules against roaming charges, so it depends on the plan.

I believe that most plans don't have roaming charges within the United States. Mine certainly doesn't. It's hard to have a competitive plan that has roaming charges.

Roaming charges outside the United States can be quite high. I have to watch carefully who I'm connected to when I'm near the Canadian border.

There are; outside of each carrier's coverage. Tho some carriers don't have roaming charges.

There can be roaming charges and roaming data caps inside the US although they're not very common with the major carriers. The only time I've specifically encountered a cap with AT&T (I have a grandfathered "unlimited" plan) was when I was in Furnace Creek in Death Valley. (For those not familiar, Furnace Creek is quite isolated but it did get cell phone service a few years back.)

As others have said, international roaming is very expensive without a specific plan. I left early on a trip to Europe last winter because of a snowstorm and before I knew it I had a big bill because I had used my phone in Toronto airport and my roaming service wasn't scheduled to begin for a couple of days. Fortunately, AT&T moved the start time for the international service earlier for me.

AFAIK AT&T always lets you buy International plan add ons back to beginning of the current bill cycle. Still a rip.

T-Mobile has 'free international data' but it's 2G speeds (capped at 128 kbps) and the upsell is a rip, $50 for half a GB.

AT&T's system for international add-ons on their site is a lot better than it used to be when you had to explicitly cancel the plan over the phone when you got back home.

I'm happy enough with their offerings. I suppose there are circumstances where I'd just buy a SIM card for my old phone when I arrived at the airport, but for most purposes I'm fine with paying $30 for 120MB or whatever it is. It's no hassle and serves my purposes for a week of travel or so.

I used the T-Mobile roaming data for a two month trip this year and was really happy with it. It may not be fast but it's pretty useful to have messaging, VOIP, and maps ready to go as soon as the plane lands.

In France, TMO free international was phenomenally useful even at 128Kb/s. You can't stream video, but I was able to get some data in the most remote places.

T-Mobile's free international roaming has been great. I used to always pick up a sim from a vending machine at Heathrow, but now I don't bother. 2G is fine for email, light web browsing and navigation.

Sprint is the slowest us mobile carrier but they've had free 2g roaming in Mexico and Canada and recently upgraded that to 3G I haven't tried to use them outside of those areas (and tbh I wouldn't expect it to work since it's not gsm) but for traveling in some subset of the Western Hemisphere, sprints not too bad.

In the US you still get charged by the minute for "extended local area" on landline plans.

So yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

Well, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's, which is what led to rapid and and widespread adoption of mobile on that continent in the first place.

What I was pointing out is there is a lot of inertia that would prevent any telephone company from changing the practice. Particularly since the consolidation of mobile carriers means most people rarely are in a roaming area.

> Well, if you want to compare apples to apples, North American landline costs were/are waaaaayyyy cheaper than Europe's

Wait... what? Bell used to charge me more for a basic landline in Montreal than I paid for 20Mpbs internet + free unlimited international calls + a hundred TV channels or so in France. The historical operator's plan for bare landline was cheaper as well.

That was back in 2007 so maybe things have changed, but from my experience landline costs in Canada were hugely more expensive than in France. I actually ended up using my parents' VoIP account (provided on the aforementioned plan) to call Canadian lines most of the time because it was cheaper than using my phone. Perhaps generalising "North America" and "Europe" just doesn't work in this case, though.

AFAICR dialup was pay-by-the-minute (for call costs) in Germany.

dialup was the same cost as a normal phone call.

But 16mbps DSL was available in most areas since 2003.

Who is paying roaming charges in the US on any of the major carriers?

I've used both AT&T and Verizon and haven't had to worry about roaming charges for a decade.

right now some genious at ATT is calculating the business case for roaming charges between US states. not like the US has anything like the EU commission enforcing rules against corporations. oh man, the billions to be reaped. and hey, how many really travel between states? and aren't most voters against the federal government and for more state-level government? make some GOP doofus to run with it, next step - profit!

Roaming in the US only really went away sometime around 2000. I would say the wireless carriers are competing pretty hard right now (what with all the offers to pay $500 to get people off their old plan and huge LTE build outs).

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