Roaming in Europe + SIM Question

[elistoughton]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

...by the time the other son travels in a few months, the newly minted European roaming rate caps will be in effect and it is possible his best bet might be to get a sim in the UK which apparently is his first stop and then roam for the rest of the trip on the UK sim card.....so our advice at this point is just to wait and see when the EU roaming caps take effect and just how economic they will be.

United Mobile is indeed a good option and most of us using it here have had pretty positive experiences with it especially coupled with an account at callbackworld or some other callback service, however rates to Liechtenstein are going up so it might not be the best choice in the future.

What are the 'newly minted European roaming rate caps'? Do you have any more detail on this?

[dg7feq]

Originally Posted by elistoughton

What are the 'newly minted European roaming rate caps'? Do you have any more detail on this?

A law was established that limits the cost for outgoing calls within the EU to 49ct/min and incoming calls to 24ct/min.
It most likely will get active by the end of summer.

Chris

[snaimon]

Is that with or without VAT? Good ol' Mehrwertsteuer! I thought I read the rates you cited were WITHOUT, so the final prices are actually higher.

And as you wrote, it is far from clear when the new rates will actually take effect. I don't think the companies can revise their billing systems that fast.

Also unclear is if and how many provides may undercut those caps and by how much.

Stan

[dg7feq]

Originally Posted by snaimon

Is that with or without VAT? Good ol' Mehrwertsteuer! I thought I read the rates you cited were WITHOUT, so the final prices are actually higher.

And as you wrote, it is far from clear when the new rates will actually take effect. I don't think the companies can revise their billing systems that fast.

Also unclear is if and how many provides may undercut those caps and by how much.

Stan

Erm, yes, without VAT. Just checked again to make sure. So for german cards the capped tariffs would be 58,31ct/min outbound and 28,56 ct/min inbound.

Got a bit confused by now as they always threw in new figures in the discussions...

Chris

[Przemolog]

Originally Posted by snaimon

Is that with or without VAT? Good ol' Mehrwertsteuer! I thought I read the rates you cited were WITHOUT, so the final prices are actually higher.

And as you wrote, it is far from clear when the new rates will actually take effect. I don't think the companies can revise their billing systems that fast.

Also unclear is if and how many provides may undercut those caps and by how much.

Stan

It had to be w/o VAT since VAT rates are country dependent (15-25% depending how greedy is a specific national government ). Moreover, AFAIK there's also a currency converting rule for non-euro countries to prevent from getting extra "hidden" profits on unfair exchange rates.

I think that updating the billing system isn't a long process if identical rates were to be applied to roaming in all EU. If ops wanted to complicate things within the limits, it might be really longer....