Same as 'free' banking in the UK, which is in reality heavily cross-subsidised by the poorest customers paying overdraft penalties.
Now that EU regulation is in place mobile operators are no longer allowed to charge the additional cost to people actually using roaming, they have to spread it across all their customers. So, net effect will be: poor people who do not use roaming (e.g. because they cannot afford vacations abroad) will pay for the convenience of middle and higher class people who travel a lot.
So roaming is actually not expensive anymore for them, and this latest regulation is the logical outcome, forcing the operators to pass their savings on to their customers.
I have still to see a reason in this thread that justifies the higher prices. If connections between different companies in a country work without significant cost, why is different between (european) countries? Damn, most of the time are the same company! It's price gouging and a racket.
There's an additional burden on their network, and they should be able to recoup some of that cost.
But almost every carrier I've seen would charge extortionate rates - hundreds or thousands of times the price they would charge their local customers for.
If they have no way to recoup the additional cost of all the incoming visitors, then they can't invest in expanding infrastructure.
It's probably a pretty limited scenario though.
Yesterday, that traffic typically was priced at euros per _mega_byte, starting at the first bit transferred; starting today that's at most €7.70 + VAT per _giga_byte, starting after you have used your (fairly generous) fair use allotment, going down to €2,50 per gigabyte in the coming years.
Naturally, countries who see many tourists heavily opposed this change and lobbied to keep the maximum price that the EU now has set high.
You'd have to be fairly destitute to not be able to afford to travel within Europe[1]. For example, even people on social welfare in the UK and Ireland can afford cheap sun holidays to Spain or wherever.
Not to mention Latvia or Bulgaria.
From the EU's perspective that was a problem, limiting 2 of 4 aspects in the single market's stated goal of free movement of goods, services, people and capital, namely services and people.
Services are still somewhat limited (you can't just buy the Latvian 15€/month service as a German in Germany, telcos made sure of that), but given the reliance of contemporary folks on connectivity, it helps somewhat on the "free movement of people" bit.
> net effect will be: poor people who do not use roaming (e.g. because they cannot afford vacations abroad)
There's a contingent in European's poor (from Eastern Europe) that works abroad (Western Europe) and benefits from not having to deal with roaming anymore.
(also, from my experience from when I was poor[0], it can be ridiculously cheap to have a few days of international vacation within the EU)
[0] poor being relative, but I think most official metrics would have covered me.
Highly questionable. Concern for the poor that only appears in the context of government regulation often seems to be motivated more by dislike of regulation than worry about the lot of the poor.
Surely you have considered that one of the reasons poor people don't travel more is the predictable large roaming bill they may face upon their return. Once people are used to being in regular contact via cellphone, they don't wish to give that up for travel. Further, suggesting that vacations are the only reason people travel seems disingenuous. People are often motivated to travel in search of work, or to attend funerals, or other in- or semi-voluntary reasons besides leisure.