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Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

Roaming is relatively niche, but very expensive product, compared to other telecommunication services, so in my opinion it was fair to charge additional fee for that.

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.

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Why is expensive? I get that in the times of analog cable, connection centers between different countries networks were cumbersome, and a service that needed to be payed exclusively by those that used it, but these days of interconnected everything?

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.

Consider the case of a small national telco that happens to have a large number of incoming tourists.

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.

Small telcos rarely handle these things themselves and instead resell bigger telcos. If anything, I hope this triggers an investment in optimising this infrastructure; if i can use the internet without caring where the physical servers are, so should my phone be.

Sorry, when I said 'small national telco' I meant a telco for a small nation.

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.

Recouping costs is different from charge through the nose for international traffic.

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.

The EU has also regulated down the price that mobile operators are allowed to charge each other for roaming though, during the last years.

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.

Roaming is relatively niche

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.

Also mobile operators are mostly huge corporations with subsidiaries in many EU countries and 'roaming' inside their own networks adds mostly zero additional costs. Which is exactly what they should have charged their customers until now (some did, but these were exceptions).

> Roaming is relatively niche

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.

> 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.

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.

[1] https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/cheap-flight-destinations

However, people on social welfare in Spain hardly can afford a cheap... (ok not sun) holidays in UK and Ireland.

Not to mention Latvia or Bulgaria.

British social welfare is considered (sorry, no source) one of the top in Europe (Swedish is probably higher).

Imagine you had to pay extra when calling someone in a different state in the US (like it used to be with landlines). Why would anyone want to go back to that? Except the telephony providers, of course.

Sometimes fair. But there have been a lot of cases of people unknowingly using data abroad and getting a bill for like £500 for half a GB of data which would fairly cost maybe £5.

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