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Comment by glebm | Hacker News Reader

Roaming costs are price gouging, the associated costs of providing roaming are nowhere near.

Example: less than a year ago I was charged ~40€ for viewing two wikipedia pages, one of them happening to contain a short video. My bad sure since I forgot to disable roaming, but this is obviously outrageous pricing, so I really don't buy the subsidising point of the naysayers.

However, now EU regulates the price to consumers to be lower than the wholesale price of roaming charges between operators. That is a failure. They should regulate the wholesale price.

In practice: I pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data. If I go to Italy and use my subscription there, I still pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data, but my operator has to pay 7 € per gigabyte to the Italian roaming partner.

Because there are more people traveling from north EU to south EU than vice versa, and competition of mobile operators works much better in northern EU, this is practically a monetary transfer to support the economies of southern Europe. And then there's the possibility that an Italian person acquires a SIM from my operator, because local Italian ones don't sell subscriptions with unlimited mobile data...

My operator has to counter this by a price hike and/or disabling of roaming.

Where do you have the €7/GB from? It's the cap, not the price usually paid. I remember a study by the EC where they found out that most operators don't pay significant amount of roaming costs. It either evens out or the amounts are too small.

Most countries will have 3-4 operators so that there is competition and I doubt that €7/GB is the cheapest an Italian operator can offer to a wholesale client.

It doesn't work like this. Your EU guaranteed roaming mobile data package is limited to 2*monthly bill/wholesale-price-per-GB. So in your case that looks like 40/7.7 which is about 5GB. Anything beyond that your telco CAN charge you (but doesn't have to) by usage. I am not sure what that charge can be, but it is per KB spent and is calculate from wholesale price per GB.

You should check if your unlimited plan applies to roaming. I have a unlimited data plan in Croatia, but in roaming it's limited to 10 GB.

EU was planning to explicitly regulate against such caps. If you provide unlimited data in your local operator's network, having caps when roaming would be in breach of this regulation.

Has that changed?

Yes, the rule is based on how much you pay for your unlimited plan compared to wholesale regulated rates.

(tho they plan to lower the regulated rates over time)

The unregulated gouging of northern European holidaymakers before this roaming regulation was probably a far bigger monetary transfer than the regulated costs.

There is still a cost. And that cost is going to be passed on to everyone whether you use it or not.

The abolishing of roaming charges also applies between operators. As the true technical cost for roaming is negligible there is really no passing of charges from those who use it to those who don't.

Is this a recent change? I hadn't heard of such.

So, e.g. Telia doesn't have to pay any roaming charge to WIND Hellas if a Telia customer from Sweden goes to Greece and connects that network?

Previously I heard a cap of 7 € per gigabyte for data fees was regulated.

Charge still is regulated to 7.7EUR per GB, but that is not its cost. Cost is indeed negligible as data is mostly transferred on exactly the same networks as the rest of Internet traffic in EU and nobody sane argues that you should pay 7 EUR for each GB you transfer.

If I divide my monthly internet bill with the amount of data I transfer during it, then price of GB of data transfer is indeed close to nothing.

To add to that: I can buy wholesale bandwidth within Europe with some ease for <$2 per TB transferred. If you look at quotes for undifferentiated transit from pure bandwidth providers it will be higher, as they typically price based on global routing, but when you know your breakdown is heavily tilted within a region, you can get massive discounts by e.g. limiting 95% or whatever of your capacity between European networks where the provider will exchange most of the traffic via peering - of course the big carriers do their own peering and own their own networks and effectively pay event less.

But even the most price-gouging "captive audience" transit providers (e.g. in data centres without multiple choices of carriers) rarely charge more than ~$10/Mbps (depending on utilisation down to ~$40 per TB transferred or about 0.04 cents per GB...)

Then have the roaming charge regulated to 7€ per terabyte, instead of 7€ per gigabyte as now.

Maybe eventually, but the point is they had to start somewhere, and 7 per GB is still a substantial reduction.

The EU parliament wanted to go much further, starting at 4 and gradually reducing to 1. They'll get pushed further down eventually, but at the same time nobody wants to overdo this and cause problems for these providers by going too fast.

My point is that they should regulate the extractive pricing between operators before they regulate the pricing operators have to give to end customers.

Now those operators that have been competitive will suffer. Those that have been extractive towards their own customers and their competitors will benefit.

That's below the price you pay for data transfer from a server at AWS.. I agree that €7/GB is probably too high, but will still be higher than for internet via cable.

AWS is a notoriously bad example as they're one of the most expensive places you can get bandwidth. I have projects where my entire infrastructure costs less than what the bandwidth charges alone would cost me at AWS...

It is a cost to my operator, and it is a cost the the EU has explicitly approved.

It would be if it was one way only. In practice users from all telcos roam on other networks, negating large bits of this exchange. Real price per user is much lower.

The roaming is far from symmetric.

I'm not sure that there is a cost in aggregate – what is the money being spent on?

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