MSE News: New rules could slash data roaming costs abroad

grumbler

NFH wrote: »

The point is that if I travel only 90 miles to France, why should it cost me 300 times as much to use data than if I travel over 300 miles to Edinburgh? The cost of using the service should be similar, irrespective of location throughout the EEA. If some levelling out of prices is necessary to achieve this, then so be it.

You can perfectly survive in France without data if it is too expensive for you.
State regulation of all prices, including non-essential ones, is a socialistic approach that proved to be inefficient by many failed states. We live in a market economy. The state intervention has to be generally limited by preventing monopolization, not by regulating every price and the shape of cucumbers - what Brussels' jobsworths keep doing to justify their enormous salaries end excessive benefits that have to be cut in the first place.

If the state doesn't like the prices, they have to privatise the industry and set the prices they like. For the obvious reasons they don't want to do this.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

You can perfectly survive in France without data if it is too expensive for you.

It's not a question of being able to survive and I never said it was. It's a question of why I should pay more to use my phone 90 miles away in France than I do when I'm over 300 miles away in Edinburgh. Why shouldn't I be able use use my monthly data bundle in France in the same way that I do in the UK?

grumbler wrote: »

State regulation of all prices, including non-essential ones, is a socialistic approach that proved to be inefficient by many failed states. We live in a market economy.

The problem is here is that there's no competition in the roaming market. You have to put up with whatever your home network charges you, and you can't shop around. If you read the press release from the European Commission, you will see that one of their proposals is to introduce competition into the roaming market, following which there should be no need to regulate prices.

The same mandate for competition started happening with fixed lines over 20 years ago. If that hadn't happened, we'd still be forced to pay BT for all line rental and calls on our fixed lines. Enforcing competition is sometimes necessary when the established players do everything they can to prevent it.

grumbler

NFH wrote: »

...Why shouldn't I be able use use my monthly data bundle in France in the same way that I do in the UK?

Why should you? It's France, not UK. They drive on the other side of the road. They use euro. They speak French and hate English. You can get only basic medical help for free there unlike in your own country etc. Why do you not complain about the cigarettes being cheaper there?
Even in UK you pay different landline rates for local and national calls.

...one of their proposals is to introduce competition into the roaming market, following which there should be no need to regulate prices.

Do it then instead of proposing. They will obviously look more busy by doing dozens of pointless steps and spreading this 'activity' over decades.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

Why should you? It's France, not UK. They drive on the other side of the road. They use euro. They speak French and hate English. You can get only basic medical help for free there unlike in your own country etc.

What bearing do any of those factors have on whether it should cost a UK customer 300 times more to use data in Calais than in Edinburgh?

grumbler wrote: »

Why do you not complain about the cigarettes being cheaper there?

First because I don't smoke, and second because it's down to tax. The EU roaming regulations are capping prices excluding tax, not including tax. Tax is not a factor in this, so your cigarette example is not a good parallel.

grumbler wrote: »

Do it then instead of proposing. They will obviously look more busy by doing dozens of pointless steps and spreading this 'activity' over decades.

I'm surprised they haven't thought of it sooner, because something similar to competition existed for roaming until around ten years ago. Every foreign network charged different prices for visiting roaming customers, and your home network would charge you the foreign networks' prices plus its own markup (around 35% I believe). You would often find that in a particular country, as well as very different prices for calls, one network would have per-second billing for example, another wouldn't charge for outgoing SMS, or another would charge very little for calls to its own customers. I remember when I lived in Germany with an Orange UK phone (before the days of PAYG in Germany), setting the order of preferred networks in my phone was important so that my phone would log on to the more optimal networks in preference to the others. The charges for incoming calls were always set by one's home network though because incoming calls pass through the home network, and Orange's incoming charges were a fraction of the other UK networks' charges. Some charges by foreign networks were very reasonable. I remember paying 6p/min for local roaming calls within Singapore for example. But 10 years ago, the UK networks (and others around the EU) decided to "standardise" roaming charges by charging their own much higher prices for every network in a given group of countries. The result was that a local roaming call within Singapore on Orange suddenly went up from 6p/min to £1.30/min. The element of competition was thereby removed, and the EU is now attempting to reinstate it, but to a greater degree than existed previously.

grumbler

NFH wrote: »

What bearing do any of those factors have on whether it should cost a UK customer 300 times more to use data in Calais than in Edinburgh?

It's obvious: you cannot expect everything over there to be the same as here. What if it was 30 or 3 times?
You asked why you shouldn't. In return I asked why you should and you have not answered my question yet.

First because I don't smoke, and second because it's down to tax. The EU roaming regulations are capping prices excluding tax, not including tax. Tax is not a factor in this, so your cigarette example is not a good parallel.

When I overpay for something and am not happy, it makes no difference to me if it is because of some tax or some other reason.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

It's obvious: you cannot expect everything over there to be the same as here. What if it was 30 or 3 times?
You asked why you shouldn't. In return I asked why you should and you have not answered to my question yet.

I had already answered that question in my earlier post in this thread. I don't wish to repeat myself.

zagfles

NFH wrote: »

I'm surprised they haven't thought of it sooner, because something similar to competition existed for roaming until around ten years ago. Every foreign network charged different prices for visiting roaming customers, and your home network would charge you the foreign networks' prices plus its own markup (around 35% I believe). You would often find that in a particular country, as well as very different prices for calls, one network would have per-second billing for example, another wouldn't charge for outgoing SMS, or another would charge very little for calls to its own customers. I remember when I lived in Germany with an Orange UK phone (before the days of PAYG in Germany), setting the order of preferred networks in my phone was important so that my phone would log on to the more optimal networks in preference to the others. The charges for incoming calls were always set by one's home network though because incoming calls pass through the home network, and Orange's incoming charges were a fraction of the other UK networks' charges. Some charges by foreign networks were very reasonable. I remember paying 6p/min for local roaming calls within Singapore for example. But 10 years ago, the UK networks (and others around the EU) decided to "standardise" roaming charges by charging their own much higher prices for every network in a given group of countries. The result was that a local roaming call within Singapore on Orange suddenly went up from 6p/min to £1.30/min. The element of competition was thereby removed, and the EU is now attempting to reinstate it, but to a greater degree than existed previously.

Quite - the networks just got incredibly greedy - a 35% markup is a very high margin - compare that to banks who tend to charge about 3% or less for foreign use of cards.

But they wanted more - far more - and when users came back off holiday to find bills of hundreds, thousands or even in some cases tens of thousands for usage which would have cost very little or even nothing in the UK, they were asking for trouble, and now they've got it, and deserve it.

zagfles

grumbler wrote: »

It's obvious: you cannot expect everything over there to be the same as here. What if it was 30 or 3 times?
You asked why you shouldn't. In return I asked why you should and you have not answered my question yet.
When I overpay for something and am not happy, it makes no difference to me if it is because of some tax or some other reason.

It shouldn't "cost the same as here". But it shouldn't cost 300 times more for a British person in France than it would cost for a French person buying the same product in the same place.

Your analogy is like going into a shop and asking for a packet of cigarettes and having to pay EUR1200 for it just because you're British, while the Frenchman in the queue behind you only has to pay EUR4.

grumbler

NFH wrote: »

I had already answered that question in my earlier post in this thread. I don't wish to repeat myself.

NFH wrote: »

The costs of operating the foreign network are roughly the same as your home network, so why should the charges be higher?

Because in the market economy prices bear very little relation to the сost price and are driven by the demand and supply in the first place. This is the main feature of the market economy as against the command economy where 20% of the population are busy calculating the 'true' prices and making sure that the prices are exactly the same in all parts of the country. Luckily, there are very few countries with this type of economy left nowadays. Unfortunately, Brussels and some UK bodies are doing their best to fill the gap. IMO, this is the main reason of the UK economy becoming uncompetitive and dying.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

Because in the market economy prices bear very little relation to the сost price and are driven by the demand and supply in the first place.

Roaming no longer operates in a free market though, and that is what the European Commission is addressing. Encouraging competition is better than regulation, and I agree with you that it's a shame this was not thought of sooner.