roaming - EU committee decision
 

"Under the new proposal charges for making mobile phone calls in other EU states would be capped at 40c a minute, excluding VAT.


The cost of receiving calls would be capped at a maximum of 15c a minute, excluding VAT. "

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0412/mobile.html


useful, but still too expensive for us, I think

Yeah, too expensive indeed...

I wish this applied to roaming charges in the USA, too, where using a European phone can cost €3 a minute.

(Never mind the rest of the world...)

It may be slightly expensive, for the outgoing part at least but it's a good start. Hopefully not every operator will immediately just charge the maximum rate.

I wonder if they have thought about the possible ways that the mobile operators may use to get around this. I can think of a few:

1. A charge for having roaming activated, maybe on a per month basis or charged every time you connect to a foreign network

2. Call connection charges, where the charge for a call may be 40c per minute but you have a connection charge of 1 euro for example.

3. Crazy billing increment like being charged for the first 3 minutes before reverting to per second or per 30 seconds.

4. Increased charges for other services to make up for revenue lost from roaming.

5. Higher charges for roaming SMS & data services.

Theres just a few, I'm sure their minds are more devious than mine.

operators in france have prepared themselves for such announcement.
they have redefind the zones to be able to apply the regulated prices to the zone "UE" and avoid those tariffs for all other zones. I don't believe that the UE can interfer on tariffs of roaming in the US, or Asie or Africa.

they also have already increased their tariffs for calls from France to Africa and Asia. All calls are now 1.5€/min. solutions like Hiboo Mobile become more and more attractive (no need to change sim)

they can't afford loosing somewhere without getting more elsewhere

> they can't afford loosing somewhere without getting more elsewhere

Why don't they try competing with each other on price like normal businesses do? The lower the price, the more people will use the service. They can't count on the ignorance of 1/4 of the population (who don't know roaming costs more) forever.

I'm afraid of something else - how about debiting and possible setup fees?
Do eurocrats think about this? I can imagine 40 cents/min with 5 min rounding and 3 euro setup fee - who and what can prevent operators from such "tariff adjustment" :-P?

Surely any "setup fees" or the like would ipso facto exceed the maximum price set by the EU. I suspect they've already thought of these tricks, as the roaming rip-off has been under discussion for at least two years, and the European Commission has already created websites and brochures warning consumers about hidden costs. As I understand it, all customers in the EU will soon automatically be switched to the new maximum tariff (40 cents/min all calls within EU, 15 to receive,60-second billing) with no extras. It's up to the providers if they want to offer a cheaper rate.

I note that 40 cents is less than many domestic mobile calls. I'd be interested to see whether these, as well as the outrageous international calling prices, will also be capped. If not, it would be generally cheaper to roam in, say, France, than to use a domestic SIM.

60 second billing is just continuing the rip off really

The real rip-off results from the combination of the billing increment and the minute rate. I prefer 5 cents/min with 60 second increment to 1 euro/min with 1 second billing :-P.