Using your mobile phone abroad

boatman

I got two weeks half board for £150!!! Turn off your mobile!

The rates for using O2 abroad are:
http://www.o2.co.uk/personal/abroad/prices/callingwhileabroad/0,,133,00.html

A simcard pack in germany for any of their networks cost £20, i think it included some credit. The problem is topping them up in a foreign language.

carmenes82

pennymakespounds- if he doesn't have a landline in his apartment, then you can still call a payphone (assuming they have the number printed on them). Why not get him to text you with the payphone number when he wants to talk; you can then call him back at the very cheap landline rates offered by providers like 1899?

This worked really well for me when I lived in the US during my gap year.

Car.

Delboy70y

Hi Car, this maybe interesting, other half in Durban South Africa, Vodafone (Pay as you Go ) Locked, Phone connected to local Vodacom Network. Txting from Uk on O2 (Free 300 minutes) SIM for Nought, and also phoning on landline for 1p/min using Phone line Connections supplied from this web page. Well done Martin, Can`t be bad.

carmenes82

That sounds pretty good- this site has certainly saved me a fortune on calls.

I wonder if anybody knows how much the mobile networks make on roaming charges and whether this figure is increasing/decreasing?

Cheers,

Car.

andy88_2

carmenes82 wrote:

I wonder if anybody knows how much the mobile networks make on roaming charges and whether this figure is increasing/decreasing?

http://www.totaltele.com/interviews/display.asp?InterviewID=304

nice graphics; from a trade journal - dates from last year

they're smugly stitching up alliances while the regulators go too slow

or they were - the EU jumped on a few around Dec, and there are reports due out sometime in the summer from a load of submissions 2 or 3 months ago - I might still be on the mailing list - I'll let you know

andy88_2

I forgot to say -

How did I find this - google search - cheap roaming calls :rotfl:

I'm off to a new €200000 job at the EU :j ...er, well, no, I just failed the selection test

andy88_2

This might be useful, or boring; you can follow links off the menu here for all kinds of bureaucratic documents, submissions,etc. Probably much more than you want just to write an article. I think something will come out of the Regulators Group in the next couple of months

http://erg.eu.int/workprog/index_en.htm

carmenes82

andy88- cheers for your help and the links- will do some digging.

What do you reckon the EU regulators are going to do? Do you reckon prices are ever going to come down much?

Car.

andy88_2

I think prices might come down a bit, but I don't think there is any competition in the market. If the regulators do something it will just be a bureaucratic minus 20% or 30% over 2 or 3 years, which is missing the point really, but maybe I'm pessimistic.

Most of the companies now have unified tariffs, the same for all visited countries, or maybe two block tariffs for East and West Europe. And as you could see from that article they are sewing up alliances all over Europe.

I started with Orange about 6 years ago. Call rates were about 25 or 30 pence per minute here to same and other networks. Roaming was a different price in each country (the local tariff plus a bit) and Orange was the best by a long way. Germany was expensive (still is) but calls in France or Belgium were about the same price as here.

As UK calls dropped in price, the international rates went up. 'Simplified' tariffs on Orange were introduced so you'd always know what you'd be paying - 60p outgoing, 30p incoming. Just under 2 years ago, the 60 went up to 70 and Orange welcomed the new entrant EU countries with a tariff increase from 52p to £1.10. I don't want this to look like a dig at Orange; the other companies were as bad or worse. A German Vodafone payg SIM roams at €2.54 per minute to countries other than Germany and the country it's in.

A phone journalist friend told me there may be multi-ID SIMs coming for corporate customers; you'd have a different number in each country, though you'd be called from home on the one. But really this would save costs for the mob company rather than lower tariffs. They need to make international agreements about termination fees that reduce the cross-network and cross-border charges. While the profit margins on some calls are over 80% as that graph shows, it will seem like nothing is happening. I saw something somewhere, can't remember, that the proportion of company profits from roaming calls was huge compared to the proportion of calls (something like 25% on 5 % of calls, but as I say, can't remember).

Maybe the regulators will have some teeth; we'll have to wait and see. It's odd, because in some countries there are new products being launched that have cheap international calls.