Mobile Roaming: Cheapest Calls When You're Abroad

spiro

VF have just introduced EuroTraveller, for £3/day you can use your UK minutes/texts/data in Europe. There is no charge for incoming calls or texts.The £3 is charged for each 24hr period that you use the phone (make calls etc).
You can either have this or Passport (75p connection charge then use UK minutes).
Signing up to this does EXCLUDE you from the EU cap.

redux

buglawton wrote: »

Just noticed that an Aldi Talk pay as you go SIMs bought in Germany can have a bolt on - a week of Data anywhere in Europe, 60MB, for just 5 Euros.

Yes. I mentioned Simyo Germany a bit earlier in the thread, with 50 MB for €5 a week, and I think perhaps other brands on e-plus also have bundles like this

Note that the billing units on this bundle (well certainly the Simyo one) are 100kB, so don't keep making lots of connections for very low use. 10 kB on its ordinary 49 cents roaming data

It strikes me that these two brands' roaming call bundle - 50 or 60 minutes of roaming calls for a week for €5 - might be better value for some people than the new daily fee options that the UK networks seem to be concocting. That's for calls to Germany, so you'd have to use separate callthough to reach the UK, but not difficult, especially with something like Localphone

Anyone who wants roaming data in small billing units and reasonably cheap might look at Roamline, which is associated with KPN Netherlands, 39 cents a megabyte, and 1 kB unit billing, though it costs something to buy the SIM in the first place. Similar to Abroadband but cheaper and more networks and more countries. Rumours there will be bundle options coming soon.

buglawton

This billing units thing confuses me. So you make a connection due to chattting online in MSN. How long before the connection drops so needing reconnecting and thus incurring a new billing unit? If the time-out is long then can have many chat transactions within one billing unit... or?

zagfles

spiro wrote: »

VF have just introduced EuroTraveller, for £3/day you can use your UK minutes/texts/data in Europe. There is no charge for incoming calls or texts.The £3 is charged for each 24hr period that you use the phone (make calls etc).
You can either have this or Passport (75p connection charge then use UK minutes).
Signing up to this does EXCLUDE you from the EU cap.

Looks like this is just for contract customers, who can no longer sign up to Passport. PAYG customers can still have Passport.

Mam00se

hi, I've just been in Japan on business and I had my Data Roaming turned on. I've now been stung with a near £1000 bill from vodafone. I can't possibly afford to pay the bill, does anyone have any advice?

beinghariom

Ohhh...It seems good to me .. I like the information that you have wrote all above .. and I am also curios to know cheapest call rate from India to south Asia.If anybody can know those things please tell me ...Thanks.

reclusive46

Mam00se wrote: »

hi, I've just been in Japan on business and I had my Data Roaming turned on. I've now been stung with a near £1000 bill from vodafone. I can't possibly afford to pay the bill, does anyone have any advice?

Well in all honesty Vodafone would have been charged all these fees by the network over there. Not much you can do but pay or not pay and default and have an absolutely crapped out credit history. You could also talk to complaints and see if they lower the bill at all.

You could get them to recalculate it, as though you had the World Data traveller which is £5 for 25mb. Should be able to lower it a bit.

spiro

Mam00se wrote: »

hi, I've just been in Japan on business and I had my Data Roaming turned on. I've now been stung with a near £1000 bill from vodafone. I can't possibly afford to pay the bill, does anyone have any advice?

Hello as a new user. Please dont take this the wrong way but were have you been for the last couple of years? living on the moon. There has been no end of stuff on the news and in the press about roaming charges and the introduction of limitied protection of EU members.
Did you not think to check the costs before you left or not just turn roaming off?
Assuming you were there for a week and used the data evenly then £1000 equates to roughly £143/day or 55mb/day. If and its a big IF they do decide to allow retrospective use of travller tariff this could (subject to daily spread of data) reduce it to £83/day an overall reduction of £420 so you will still have a £600 bill to pay.
What type of phone do you have and what internet services did you use?

mrcamp

Obviously, you made a HUGE mistake by leaving data roaming turned on. In reality, you are liable for the charges. However, you can talk to them to see if they can lower it in good gesture.

Mam00se wrote: »

hi, I've just been in Japan on business and I had my Data Roaming turned on. I've now been stung with a near £1000 bill from vodafone. I can't possibly afford to pay the bill, does anyone have any advice?

grumbler

reclusive46 wrote: »

Well in all honesty Vodafone would have been charged all these fees by the network over there.

All? In all honesty? How can they afford charging £0.2/Mb with Data Traveller when charging £3/Mb without it then?