No EU roaming fees - no roaming (anymore)

[wolfbln]

Originally Posted by bylo

I think so. Perhaps the first use should include "Fair Use Policy (FUP)." In English FUP is normally the acronym for "follow up."

As for difficulty in understanding the page, I'd lay the blame on the telcos for making such a complicated implementation of so simple a concept. Ideally the page should be short, e.g. "You can now roam throughout the following countries at your home rates, i.e. without any roaming surcharges."

Sorry, i might have explained the term FUP once in the text. In Wikipedia.com it pops up as first suggestion. So I thought you are familiar with that term. The wording of "fair use policy" is an industry term for sure and I don't like it. What is fair about a throttle? And for me it has a moralistic undertone. But i will add some explanatory words. The Wiki is always hard to phrase as it appeals to people with very different foreknowledge. That's why a kind of manual has been added already.

The article describes the reasons why it's so tricky for the operators:
Quote:
The regulation concerns 28+3 national markets with different rules, licences, fees and costs. The gaps within Europe are still wide. For example, consumers in Latvia spent in 2014 on average €3.70 a month and Irish consumers an average of €23.80 per month for using their mobile phones.

Europeans have different travel habits across the countries, and there are also different network costs in visited countries. Consumer retail offers vary widely between states. In 2016 the cheapest monthly deals offering 1GB of data, 600 minutes of calls and 225 SMS ranged from €60 in Hungary to €8 in Estonia (excl. VAT). For prepaid data 1GB is commonly sold at €10 in Germany, while you can get it for less than the equivalent of €0.40 in Poland.

Now, imagine that you want to impose one general rule, that applies to all countries and all roaming consumption shall be charged according to the domestic rate of the home country which is commonly referred to as "roam like (at) home" or RLH.
This will eventually lead to people in Hungary taking a SIM from Estonia and use it in their own country roaming forever.

Imagine you in Canada with the highest prices in the Americas will go down to Bolivia and take a SIM from there to use it in Canada at Bolivian rates. This will not pay off for Rogers, Telus and Bell, I guess. So the operators wanted to have a lot of safeguards in place.

It's a miracle that it's working adequately at all. And as an American you are probably not so unfamiliar with people who consider "state ordered" unified prices as "socialism" or the end of free maket society. You can find them here too.