Mobile data abroad charges coming 1/2022

David208

Hopefully Marin will take this on!!
vodaphone + EE introducing charges from 1/2022 so instead of using your existing data abroad you now pay for it
no announcement from other providers yet but expecting the same????
for our 2 phones holiday use will add £200+ to our yearly bill
How do we get Martin to take this battle on???    

redux

What do you expect Martin Lewis to do, reverse Brexit? Or persuade Boris Johnson to produce new regulations?

If data is your main interest, look at local SIM cards.

Neil_Jones

David208 said:

Hopefully Marin will take this on!!
vodaphone + EE introducing charges from 1/2022 so instead of using your existing data abroad you now pay for it
no announcement from other providers yet but expecting the same????
for our 2 phones holiday use will add £200+ to our yearly bill
How do we get Martin to take this battle on???    

You don't.  Roaming charges (or lack of them) were a EU decision so if you were in another EU country you didn't pay them.  Since we're not in the EU now, that doesn't apply and it wasn't a protected "thing" either.  Solution:  Use wifi where available.

Decision is purely commercial.  Used to be the standard thing before 2017 I think it was before that law was introduced.

CKhalvashi

If you don't like it, vote with your wallet, making sure you write to the Chief Executives office to make them aware of the reason. I have on this matter (and various others).

It's only when a company loses more than it gains from these changes that things will be reversed.

armith

Yes, this is a commercial decision. Presumably it costs mobile operators quite a bit of money to offer free roaming so they've weighed up the benefits to them. For the vast majority of people it'll be a few £s a year, which they will probably not leave for. But for heavy overseas users it could be a whole lot more, so they'll possibly/probably leave, which will not bother the carrier because they were loss-making accounts anyway.

The tipping point would come if tens of thousands of people who hardly make use of this feature leave and state that it's because of the new roaming charges, which is very unlikely.

The alternative would be for a carrier to continue to offer free EU roaming and to add a tiny amount to their whole customer base's ordinary charges but, again, this might lead to them getting lots of customers that they don't want (heavy overseas users) and not the domestic only users put off by the slightly higher domestic prices.

But if you do spend so much time in EU countries then an EU SIM makes far more sense, especially if you've got a dual SIM phone.

J_B

armith said:

But if you do spend so much time in EU countries then an EU SIM makes far more sense, especially if you've got a dual SIM phone.

As an aside, we have a Cyprus sim for this purpose (PAYG). As long as you top up with €10 per year, they keep your number live.

As we didn't want to lose our number and we haven't been since Nov 2019 (and we were using our UK phone mainly), we now have about €35 of credit on it!

Maybe we will have to use it more if/when we go again!!!

iniltous

I don’t know which way the OP voted in the 2016 referendum, but  it would be a bit hypocritical for anyone who voted leave  to complain about this, for a ‘leave’ voter surely its a price well worth paying 

CKhalvashi

iniltous said:

I don’t know which way the OP voted in the 2016 referendum, but  it would be a bit hypocritical for anyone who voted leave  to complain about this, for a ‘leave’ voter surely its a price well worth paying 

Political debate is not acceptable on the forums at this time.

redux

armith said:

Yes, this is a commercial decision. Presumably it costs mobile operators quite a bit of money to offer free roaming so they've weighed up the benefits to them. For the vast majority of people it'll be a few £s a year, which they will probably not leave for. But for heavy overseas users it could be a whole lot more, so they'll possibly/probably leave, which will not bother the carrier because they were loss-making accounts anyway.

The tipping point would come if tens of thousands of people who hardly make use of this feature leave and state that it's because of the new roaming charges, which is very unlikely.

The alternative would be for a carrier to continue to offer free EU roaming and to add a tiny amount to their whole customer base's ordinary charges but, again, this might lead to them getting lots of customers that they don't want (heavy overseas users) and not the domestic only users put off by the slightly higher domestic prices.

But if you do spend so much time in EU countries then an EU SIM makes far more sense, especially if you've got a dual SIM phone.

It does not cost mobile operators quite a lot. This myth needs scotching.

Somewhere I may still have the roaming booklet I got from Orange in 1999. Outgoing calls in Europe were typically 30 to 35 pence a minute, which may sound a lot now, but the cost of home minutes outside the monthly bundle was 35 pence a minute. Incoming was cheaper than this.

Around 2005, wholesale cost to networks of an incoming roaming call was about 6 to 12 pence a minute. But some were charging over £1 a minute. Profit margins well over 90%

When some of the first cheap roaming providers introduced free incoming calls, I asked the boss of one of these how they could do it. He said don't forget we also receive the incoming termination fees paid by the caller's network, which subsidises it.

But nowadays the wholesale termination rates on European networks have dropped to well under a cent or penny a minute, typically half that. Even more expensive ones like Isle of Man or Jersey are under a penny.

Look at typical contract offers nowadays, on deals without an expensive phone. Under £10 a month for unlimited calls unlimited texts and a good chunk of data, maybe from £5 with modest data amounts.

Is it reasonable to ask someone who goes on holiday for 3 weeks to pay five to ten times their monthly price? No. Bringing back in £2 a day charge for perhaps just one call or a few minutes of data use is ridiculous.

I can remember a few years ago in Germany, a friend was about to look up some website using his UK Vodafone phone. Instead of their few quid, I forced him to use mine instead, which had a German SIM in and cost me 24 cents. Data rates have fallen since then. Nowadays using a UK Three or O2 payg SIM for this would be 3 pence.

Returning to this flat rate a day scheme is anachronistic with the lower rates available nowadays. £2 or £3 a month would be fairer if they really feel they have to do something.

I agree with the previous post that politics doesn't belong on this board. But this change isn't a fair price to pay, for anyone.

Money_Grabber13579

I suspect this has been thought about by the networks otherwise they wouldn’t be making this move, but I’m curious.  When we left the EU, all of the EU rule book was transposed into UK legislation, with the necessary adaptions, such as references to “other EU member states” becoming “countries which are members of the EU/EEA” so as to ensure that the rules continued to apply.

My understanding was that the only exception to this was where the government then passed a further piece of specific legislation to reverse or override specific EU rules which they didn’t want to continue following. Does that mean the government have passed legislation which specifically allows the networks to introduce roaming charges again? If so, it would seem to be a curious policy choice and particularly one that it was deemed to be of such priority.

dazzaofdagenham

J_B said:

armith said:

But if you do spend so much time in EU countries then an EU SIM makes far more sense, especially if you've got a dual SIM phone.

As an aside, we have a Cyprus sim for this purpose (PAYG). As long as you top up with €10 per year, they keep your number live.

As we didn't want to lose our number and we haven't been since Nov 2019 (and we were using our UK phone mainly), we now have about €35 of credit on it!

Maybe we will have to use it more if/when we go again!!!

Can you link me to this PAYG plan please