MSE News: EU mobile data roaming costs to fall

m5rcc

NFH wrote: »

For sending texts to and from people in the UK, you would indeed be better off with a UK PAYG SIM card. Your Spanish Vodafone SIM when used in Spain is not regulated by the EU roaming regulations, whereas a UK PAYG SIM roaming in Spain is regulated. It would also be cheaper (often free) for people in the UK to send you texts, whereas it will almost certainly cost them more to send to a Spanish number.

Or use a cheaper SIM like Carrefour's which is 8cents/txt

Tony5101

Interesting times ahead...in some cases it would appear it will be cheaper to 'roam' than stay on your home network....

grumbler

NFH wrote: »

For sending texts to and from people in the UK, you would indeed be better off with a UK PAYG SIM card.

I must say that the article is absolutely unclear what texts €0.11/0.08/0.06 cap applies to.
I guess it is only for the texts sent back to the original country. If so, the way the author presents this is very misleading and creates a false impression that it applies to all roaming texts sent from EU.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

I must say that the article is absolutely unclear what texts €0.11/0.08/0.06 cap applies to.
I guess it is only for the texts sent back to the original country.

The cap applies to text messages sent to any EEA number when roaming in another country within the EEA. It does not apply to text messages sent from one's home country (even when roaming, e.g. Orange/T-Mobile). See Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 717/2007 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 June 2007 on roaming on public mobile telephone networks within the Community and amending Directive 2002/21/EC which gives all the relevant definitions. Unfortunately caps for text messages were introduced after 2007 and I can't find the subsequent legislation that added them.

grumbler

If so, why do you say "to and from people in the UK"?

Should we all get a roaming PAYG sim from some EU country to save on texting to EU (and to UK in some cases) then? At, say, Orange a text to EU costs 20.5p

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

If so, why do you say "to and from people in the UK"?

Vodafone Spain's price of €0.60 that maggie.ray quoted for sending a text does not apply to domestic texts within Spain, only for international texts from Spain. As maggie.ray is posting in a UK forum, I assumed that texts to and from the UK were relevant rather than texts between Spain and a third country.

grumbler wrote: »

Should we all get a roaming PAYG sim from some EU country to save on texting to EU (and to UK in some cases) then?

If you send a large number of international texts, then this could indeed be cost effective.