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Comment by mihular | Hacker News Reader

Definitely positive for everybody. An example (Slovenia) is a new package from A1(Vodafone) with 15GB everywhere in EU without limits for 20€. Previously was like 22€ for 4GB local only.

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For some telcos this is a very tough deal. Countries with a lot of foreign visitors, like Spain or Italy, will have to improve network capacity to sustain the added data volume, and with no increase in revenue. A lot of carriers still operate at local country level in Europe. I guess the long-term plan is that that most telcos will end up merging into pan-european companies.

Note that the telcos don't stop charging each other for roaming, they just stop charging customers. This might even be good news for Spanish and Italian telcos.

Actually, in the article the journalist argues that it IS good news for them.

True, but the regulation limits how much they can charge each other so they need to make it up in volume.

Before they could charge 51.2 EUR/GB which is now lowered to 7.7 EUR/GB set to go down in steps to 2.5 EUR/GB by 2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...

51 euros per gigabyte is absurd.

They used to be charging multiple euros per MEGABYTE. You can see why regulation was needed.

7.7 EUR/GB is still absurd, it's 2017.

That's 77 euro for 10GB. For that money you can buy a 1TB harddrive, send it by mail, and it will be faster still.

You'll have to use one hell of a postal service since 200mbit/s LTE is common now (1TB will take around 12h).

LTE in EU, not so much :), it's available just now widely adopted

You think €51 per GB is absurd? I have a Vodafone prepaid connection from Germany. Currently traveling in Switzerland, Vodafone informed me my roaming data charges are 17ct per 50 Kb.

A little back of the envelope calculation and that puts my rate at €3.500 per GB. Now that's an absurd value!!

I'm curious if that was postpaid. My prepaid Vodafone data started working EU-wide without extra charges just over a year ago.

> Gut zu wissen: Du nutzt Deine Highspeed-MB mit Deinem CallYa-Tarif ohne Aufpreis in der ganzen EU. Falls Du den Basispreis oder Deine Tarif-Option nicht zahlst, kostet ein MB 5,95 Cent.

Switzerland is not in the EU

Switzerland is not in EU, so the prices for there are not regulated.

As a result on my prepaid CallYa plan, I have insane charges when roaming here.

I think when I (a European) visit the US, my roaming cost is about 15 euro per MB. You read that right, MB. Not GB.

It is.

In 2008 I downloaded 30 MB Firefox nightly on a ThinkPad whilst roaming in Serbia. Bad move. Set me back ~600 EUR.

I didn't know this beforehand, but I was 'lucky' to struck a deal with Vodafone to cut the cost in half.

Serbia isn't in EU though, and this was in 2008.

7.7 EUR per gigabyte is still a ridiculous price. I simply refuse to believe that this is even close to the actual costs.

This is very problematic, since in some countries operators are selling fix price 4G subscriptions with no data cap for prices like 20-50EUR/month. Now they are supposed to let us roam free, but still pay the outrageous per gigabyte fees to other operators.

This benefits large, multinational operators which sell data capped subscriptions. Small, local and competitive get hurt.

Yes that's why they can set limits on unlimited plans and start charging "reasonably" after those limits are exceeded.

8 E/GB is 3+ orders of magnitude more than the bandwidth cost for a telco.

Right, but that's backbone traffic cost. The majority of total cost is going to be the wireless part of your data's journey. Interpolating from intranational data cost, 8€/GB is still a lot but maybe off by one order of magnitude, not three

But the rate they can charge to each other is capped, I think. I should have not said "no extra revenue" in any case, that is true. My mistake.

I have learned a while ago that, while telcos are technically charging each other for cross-network traffic, no real money ever exchange hands. In practice, two telcos issue invoices to each other, the amounts cancel out and anything that remains is just transferred as the starting point to the next accounting period.

Even if true for most, it most likely is not true for every operator.

So those abusive prices per-MB only apply to... small operators who don't have international presence?

Sounds like an opportunity for a very small telco to build towers in touristy/CBD/expat areas and charge foreign carriers for traffic.

Isn't it actually the other way around? Telcos in tourist destinations will have to increase capacity, but they still get to bill the user's home telco at the wholesale roaming rate – so they do still receive revenue.

Actually telcos in those countries with many foreign visitors will still make money. While consumers enjoy 'roam like at home' without additional costs, there are still wholesale roaming charges in place for the home carrier [0]. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that these wholesale roaming caps are comparable to typical consumer prices, meaning they should result in actual profits (at least compared to German prices, which are generally not the cheapest).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...

> I guess the long-term plan is that that most telcos will end up merging into pan-european companies.

The EU does have a goal of creating a Single Market.

there are quite a lot of Telecoms having the same parent company, so it's just pure profit for them.

If the regulation implies improving the local infrastructure and the companies invest something, even better.

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