Vodafone GPRS Roaming in France

mbailey

I have just come back from France and looked at my online bill to show to call costs.

Standard text messages were around 30p each which is what I was expecting.

I used email on my phone (Sony Ericsson K750) over GPRS as I thought this would be cheaper than SMS.

My bill is rather alot more than I was expecting and this is down to the GPRS costs. I seem to have been charged 97pence each time I connected. On the odd occasion I downloaded more that 200kb then this was more.

I have a number of lines on my bill when I only downloaded a few kb and these are still charged at 97pence each.

Is this really correct?

Can I complain to Vodafone?

mobile-advice

Hi

Unfortunately, this is not a well-known issue and many people have fallen into this trap.

When you take your phone abroad, effectively, you're using other companies network (hence the term 'roaming'). It's up to the service provider, ie. Vodafone to negotiate prices as they will have to pay the host country for using their network.

GPRS, as a roaming product is still a relatively new product compared to voice calls and texting - and possibly even more so in France, which would explain the higher costs.

I've heard of costs of up to £25 per MB for GPRS whilst roaming; it's more dependent on country/operator rather than the UK network.

monomer

For more details about Vodafone's GPRS roaming costs take a look at this page:

http://vodafone.co.uk/usingdataabroad

There's a link at the bottom of that page that gives you some idea of what they charge.

For both GPRS WAP and GPRS internet access the quoted rate is "Up to £10.28 per MB". GPRS internet seems to be charged at a higher 'unit' price compared to accessing just WAP.

For GRPS internet:

Billing increments are in 100KB steps with a minimum 200KB charge.

And GPRS WAP is a bit cheaper:

Billing increments are in 10KB steps and on average costs 1p per KB

It's not something that Vodafone commonly advertise, but if I remember correctly, charging in units was in force since at least the second half of last year.

feival

You have definitely spotted the real issue here. It is the rounding increments. Frankly this is outrageous. Vodafone own part of SFR in France and without any doubt they have discount agreements between the networks resulting in the underlying being MUCH MUCH lower. Franbkly they are ripping you off. If you go frequently move to a different network where you are chagred on the basis of 1Kb rounding. Frankly, unless you are using a laptop the price per Mb can be immaterial compared to the rounding mechanism. Remember a typical WAP sesssion may only use 10Kb and a picture mesage uses about 30Kb (very much dependent upon the phone, camera resolution, phone settings and network equipemtn settings too...)

mbailey

monomer wrote:

For more details about Vodafone's GPRS roaming costs take a look at this page:

http://vodafone.co.uk/usingdataabroad

There's a link at the bottom of that page that gives you some idea of what they charge.

For both GPRS WAP and GPRS internet access the quoted rate is "Up to £10.28 per MB". GPRS internet seems to be charged at a higher 'unit' price compared to accessing just WAP.

For GRPS internet:
And GPRS WAP is a bit cheaper: It's not something that Vodafone commonly advertise, but if I remember correctly, charging in units was in force since at least the second half of last year.

The rounding issue is the problem - minimum 200kb.

I can see on my bill that most of the connections are only a few kb.

I think I will get on the phone to Vodafone Customer Service tomorrow and see what they say.

Will let you know how I get on.