Reasonable roaming
The European Commission has had a problem with the amount mobile phone operators charge European customers for making calls when they travel to other parts of the EU. Today its proposed new roaming rules have been formally adopted and will come into effect from 1 July.
"This is great news for European citizens who will be able to go on holiday this summer and roam with peace of mind and without the fear of 'bill shocks'," said EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding, who had apparently been on holiday for the past three weeks herself, and thus could empathise with our plight.
Here's a summary of what the new rules mean when roaming:
- The price of text messages is capped at €0.11 (excl VAT), compared to a current average of €0.28
- A wholesale cap on data roaming charges of €1 per megabyte downloaded, compared to an average EU wholesale price of € 1.68/MB. The cap will fall to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011
- Operators must offer customers a cut-off level of €50 on roaming calls
- Cap of €0.43/min for calls made (currently €0.46) and €0.19/min for calls received (currently €0.22) while roaming - excl VAT. These caps will drop further to €0.39/€0.15 on 1 July 2010, and to €0.35/€0.11 by 1 July 2011
- Billing per second, as opposed to per minute, after the first 30 seconds of calls made and immediately on calls received while roaming
This looks like good news for mobile phone users on holiday, but we'd like to know how big an impact you think these rules will have on your phone bill. Let us know in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
