[MATHA531]

Originally Posted by andy

When the American Government tries to force through cheap roaming at 20 cents a minute and finds its path blocked by the UK or any other administration, or stops the USA being one of the world's most expensive for roaming, either for visitors there or its own citizens travelling abroad, then there may be more reason to complain, but ...

Some journalist at The Times has apparently taken a year to do some research, as you could read similar suggestions then.

No, the European Union has 27 countries, and the large networks were also canvassing other governments regulators and the various EU bodies

The proposed or hoped-for level may have been 16.5 cents incoming actually, plus vat taking it to 20 or so. And don't forget that further drops are lined up in the next two years

Today the same newspaper includes the news that an affiliate commission based price comparison site says that O2 has just introduced 20 pence a minute charges for non-geographic numbers that were previously free.

No, the calls were previously in inclusive minutes, not actually free, and the changes were announced by O2 2 months ago and implemented a month ago, and some users have chosen and were allowed to end contracts early, perhaps without The Times journalists noticing

The same article today also quotes another source, a similarly commission-based operation that has some rather odd churning practices i.e from company A to B then back to A, which says it takes up to 5 days to transfer a number from one UK network to another, and this is why hardly anyone ever switches ntworks .......... errrm, sure, but they also seem to overlook those who take out contracts with new numbers, and are perhaps only looking at numbers of a market they feel they are missing out on

I don't know why journalists lap up press releases which land on their desks without moderating them with their own knowledge and research ...
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Some of the debate propaganda and negotiation on roaming fees has been about which is more effective, regulation or a competitive market. It might seem paradoxical that a UK government that some outsiders might view as left-wing is so strongly for a market, even if we think this one's been fixed, but don't forget that arguably they deregulated and introduced competition in utility industries rather more than their predecessors who only sold the monopolies.

And whilst it's certainly sometimes appeared that the networks have been stuck in the mud ...

Vodafone has had Passport for about two and a half years. Perhaps part of its position was that it wanted this to remain as an option it could still offer rather than the Eurotariff to be centrally imposed as mandatory for everyone. I don't know, but a couple of contextless sentences snatched from a civil servant's memo or note of a phone conversation don't clarify that.

2 other UK networks already have lower charges than the new Eurotariff, namely 3 with 15 eurocent incoming calls throughout Europe or actually free on sister 3 networks, and O2, which also has a free incoming calls option, something which was first announced a year ago for one roamed country, and last January for all of Europe.

If I were to travel to Italy, I (or anyone) could roam 3 UK on 3 there and call UK landlines and mobiles ad hoc for 12 pence a minute, or with 400 minutes a month for £15 or 700 minutes for £21; the latter is 6 US cents a minute. Add under a cent a minute for callthrough to USA ...

Try reading that in The Times. Their only really valid point today is that roaming fees have been cut for calls but not data. Pretending today that 35 pence a minute to an 0871 number is a recent increase is simply ignorance

The only quibble I might have with what you say, and it certainly is no business of mine (I just posted the article as I found it interesting), is whether, for example, vodafone would have introduced passport if the eu had not announced the possibility of regulating intra eu roaming fees.

I've always wondered , and call me dumb, how, for example, vodafone UK could justify such high fees if one were roaming on vodafone italy because, as I understand it, part of the idea behind roaming fees is to reimburse the company one is roaming on for use of its facilities...to me this seems like taking money out of your left pocket and putting it into your right pocket as vodafone is vodafone whether it be UK or Italy...

But you're right, of course. You wouldn't expect the current US government to support regulation such as this so T Mobile USA a fully owned subsidiary of Deutsch (sp.) Telcom can continue to charge 99¢/minute to roam on T Mobile UK who is fully owned by the same company and tell us that is to reimburse the UK company to allow roaming on its network....abut 99.9% of the people in the USA could care less as they don't have a clue about these things.

Didn't mean to get your ire up on this....I had been looking through the Times to see if anybody cared about the Giants-Dolphins game being played in London (it was an awful game) and stumbled across the article and found it interersting.