An end to ‘bill shock’ as EU mobile roaming charges are slashed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This means that most of the time if you have someone visiting you there is a huge asymmetry in prices when corresponding, the only problem is: I don't know how they're ever going to address this.
(Especially since apps tend to send data automatically and also because you're one surprise sync or app store update away from financial catastrophe.)
Two of the 4 major US carriers are able to offer free (but somewhat slow) data roaming in Europe, and the other two sell relatively cheap packages for data roaming. How can US carriers offer cheaper roaming in Europe than European carriers themselves?
The EU limited cross-national SMS to 10ct per SMS, and 10ct per minute of phone calls, too.
Aldi Talk costs only 0,12€ to US, Canada, Mexico, and only 0,11€ to EU (same as nationally).
[1] http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2015/10/27/news/parlamen...
This will go along way in preventing people getting slaughtered because Windows decided to quietly do a 300mb update. 15 Euro...big deal. Hell there are country/carrier combinations where that will cost you ~10k EUR (admittedly non-EU...don't know what the highest EU combo is).
Most people just want to check their mails and browse facebook without having to re-mortgage their house.
But as I said - edge case and very much something that most people would think through carefully in terms of connectivity. e.g. I knew today I can push maybe 250mb before my 3G bombed out. So I browsed instead of netflixed.
Plus €35.00 per movie streamed.
100 pages @ 2.3Mb [1] costs over €10.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-origin...
Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the world.
Often it's even hard to tell if something is going to turn out to be a good decision or bad. So even ignoring potential corruption or incompetence and assuming best intentions, it's still seems better to me not to depend on a single entity.
> Certainly forcing the standization of chargers
Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. Companies were simply optimizing for profit and that decision aligned with it.
I vividly recall the days of smartphones with custom variants of usb cables.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
Samsung / LG etc were the worst with cables you couldn't even use with different models.
Nokia + Sony were the best as theirs worked for all their respective phones + later nokia switched to USB micro. The standards change made everything so much better!
There was no EU regulation because the manufacturers fell in line when the EU threatened them with much stricter rules than what they "asked" them to adopt.
I haven't seen the profits they're making so I don't know if they're going to have to, but they may.
People often overestimate corporate profits. They hear some company made two billion dollars in profits and start going "ohmygersh what rapacious capitalists", until you notice that they made two billion in profit on fifty-two billion in revenue while employing fifty thousand people. Making two cents of profit on 52 cents of transaction probably doesn't sound quite as bad, and then when you realize that if their costs were merely 4% higher it would have wiped out all their profit (and put the 50,000 employees at risk), and you probably come to a better understanding of the situation. So, what kind of cost increase for the companies is this going to be? I don't know.
Also, I don't mean that "a better understanding of the situation" means that you'll always feel sorry for the big companies, or something; I just mean you'll get a more realistic view of the situation in general, which is good regardless of your goals.
I made the numbers up, but the orders of magnitude are reasonable. There are some very large companies that make more than ~5% profit, but it's actually not a large list; 5% is not that uncommon.
Because ever since the internet was invented, it has obviously become very, very, very cheap to send data all over the world. And this is what we're talking about: your SMS needs to go from the provider in country A to provider in country B. How does it do that? Via a standardized protocol over the internet. How much does that cost? Nothing, all the network components have an internet uplink anyway.
The only thing left to explain high roaming prices is market failure, hence the need to intervene by the EU. Only we had the market failure pour its money into the EU, so it's very far off from the regulatory intervention that should have been made.
If roaming is cheaper, something else is now more expensive, given that the company's profit margin isn't high to start with.
Roaming fees are probably more progressive anyway and subsidizing plans for less mobile people, aka income limited people.
AT&T had a problem where they could not create a bill for some government networking services. It was build in that they had a fixed window which kept expiring. This went on for years while they fought to keep the contract...
I don't recall all the details but read up on FTS-2000 it was a mess.
>http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home
>Use your phone abroad at no extra cost in
>Australia
>Austria
>Denmark
>Finland
>France
>Hong Kong
>Indonesia
>Israel
>Italy
>Lanzarote - Spain
>Macau
>New Zealand
>Norway
>Republic of Ireland
>Spain
>Sri Lanka
>Sweden
>Switzerland
> and United States
Seems rather unnecessary.
I'm tempted to say they should allow perpetual roamers.
That throttled plan I mentioned is sufficiently slow that nobody sane will actually use it long term. Only tourists will use it (google maps & lost) and people utterly desperate for communication. Now if you think about Norway etc introducing broadband internet as a human right then I think we can throw people a bone and give free 384kbps free (thats roughly what it felt like - baring the freakish FB voice working).
384kbps is really at a point where one can say fk it the community will take the financial hit for the greater good. If everyone is guaranteed the ability to send whatsapp/telegram/fb messengers to loved ones & friends that'll save us all a good amount of grief.
For context: It still connects at HSDPA/LTE speeds @ physical link but the throughput is 384kbps - picking that number because I used to be on 384 DSL as a reference point...not because I measured it.
Actually operators work in a big clearinghouse model where I live - so at the end of the month there are barely any charges exchanged.
So one of the use-cases for perpetual roaming is to buy "cheap" SIM cards from another country and to then use them in your (more expensive) home country, which would lead to an asymmetric roaming behavior between the two providers (so one of those providers would have to pay the other one).
But if you have two countries where retail prices differ a lot, this can lead to people from both countries to buy SIM cards from the cheaper country, causing an asymmetry in the roaming volume: Now suddenly one provider has lots of outgoing roaming, but much less incoming roaming - which means that this provider is going to have to pay the wholesale prices for the difference in roaming volume.
I'd love to throw out my santa sack of international sim cards. Maybe I should stop whingeing and just buy some telco shares. Can't beat 'em-
If mobile carriers are colluding to set unreasonable roaming charges then prosecute that as a cartel. But the EU has no business establishing actual call and data charges.
As a result of their intervention they indirectly increase domestic mobile rates for all the people who aren't roaming. The mobile firms can just increase domestic rates to compensate for lower roaming revenues.
If the mobile providers continue to gouge customers by just transferring the costs to domestic billing, then that is something that the EU should also address, and as a subject of EU regulations in this regard, I'm all for it.
I doubt that'll be necessary, "local" prices are something users can and do check when comparing offers. The roaming issue comes from roaming info usually being small footnotes, most consumers not thinking about the subject (and not considering they'd need it) and needs changing, most people didn't really need data roaming a few years ago, things are markedly different with the "always connected" smartphones.
Basically, roaming prices were a place where MSPs could safely gouge a small fraction of consumers (and make them feel bad for it) without much risk of building up a big protest movement. Most of them apparently didn't see or refused to act on the winds changing, and thus the EU hammer coming down on the practice.
Then the EU should set standards for roaming advertising and contracts, not dictate the price.
I can't think of any other domain of business where a Western national or supra-national government set privte-sector prices because customers can't be trusted to read T&Cs.
Car rental contracts often have horrific small-print penalties for crossing intra-European state boundaries, but I don't see the EU intervening there.
Example: California, fixing prices of electricity within the state. (not a good example, but one you should probably be aware of as it supports your argument while also giving you a clue that its not just the naughty euro-socialists doing these sorts of things..)
Anyway the EU are not setting prices because customers don't read T&C's. They're setting prices because their citizens get royally screwed by price gouging, whether they read the T&C or not, and its a serious economic issue in a region where cross-border travel is significantly higher than in any other part of the world.
Its one thing to assume that the EU is exerting some sort of fascist power over the free market and ruining it. Its another thing entirely when the EU actually does its job and protects the subjects of its member states from predatory business practices... but I guess this is an economics argument about the free market and capitalism, which I fear is not one you and I are about to form consensus. I'm quite happy for the telecom's to be getting their comeuppance in this market - the gouging is really, really heinous. For those of us who have to live here and work within the EU framework, this is exactly the sort of thing the EU is good for...
You assume that operators are already working in the margins, which is far from the case.
EDIT: Also, this will encourage phone networks to seek internationally partnerships to share costs, which is in line with the whole "transnational project" part of the European Union actively striving it strives for an actual European Union.
Many of the carriers are pan-European anyway, with local branding. So the concept of a "domestic rate" is already an anachronism.
Roaming users were being gouged because they could be. Now they won't be gouged any more, and that's entirely a good thing.
Other friends who are on pay-as-you-go report similar changes.
The EU has always been working to make borders in EU irrelevant for people's freedom. Considering the importance of smartphones these days, being effectively cut off from facebook may be one of the most directly felt downsides with leaving your country.
Don't want government intervention - don't use public resources.