MSE News: Mobile roaming costs could fall this summer

MSE_Article wrote:

Outgoing calls: Capped at €0.25 per minute from July 2012, €0.20 from July 2013 and €0.15 from July 2014.

So, from July 2014 a maximum of about 12.5p/minute to make a roaming call across the EU. That will make roaming calls within the EU significantly cheaper than domestic calling within the UK for anyone on many standard PAYG tariffs (often 20p or 25p per minute), or out-of-bundle minutes on contracts (quite often as high as 40p per minute).

Is anyone going to pay attention to UK prices, or will we end up with free calls roaming in Europe and £1/min for UK calls? It seems that as soon as restrictions are placed in one area (termination rate, roaming etc) they profiteer as much as possible by upping charges elsewhere. 40p per minute is simply madness for a UK call. It is just to allow the networks to offer seemingly attractive bundles, which rely on either significant underuse (and therefore a higher than necessary monthly fee) or significant overuse (and get utterly ripped off through run-on rates).

grumbler wrote: »

IMO, the only attention we need is to stop the companies from burying the excessive charges in the small print, that will help the customers to make the right decision and vote with their feet.

The regulators should have stepped in over ten years ago when the mobile networks removed competition in the roaming market. Until 2001, there was competition for roaming whereby each visited network would set and publish charges for visitors, which would be marked up by the home network by a fixed percentage, typically 35%. Home networks throughout the EU and around the world then decided to "simply" roaming charges by setting their own much higher uniform charges applicable to all visited networks within a particular country or region, irrespective of the varying lower wholesale charges set by each visitied network. For example, Orange UK customers were charged 6p/min for outgoing local calls on the cheapest visited network in Singapore, but this suddenly jumped to £1.30p/min when Orange introduced "simplified" prices on 01/02/2001; it was a similar story with other networks. This anti-competitive behaviour should have been stopped at the outset instead of allowing it to mushroom into the excessively high charges that consumers suffer now.

thriftymanc wrote: »

Maybe I'm being thick but if this is true, why are we always hearing stories of people being hit with bills for hundreds or even thousands of pounts? I'm sure no one agrees to be charged that much!

I think that cap is relatively recent in relation to those stories we here. But even if it's not, it only applies to EU roaming - people can still run up those sorts of bills everywhere else.

I personally think the whole of the EU should have to be treated as "national" and not "international" with regards to calls etc. The networks may have an argument with data though (but it's still excessive).