The EU parliament has voted and agreed on reducing roaming charges, to take effect from July (shame on holiday in June!). The cuts will become active on July 1st and there are plans for more to come into effect over the next few years. So every network that resides in a EU member state, is having to cut down all charges related to roaming to the limit set by the EU parliament.
The new limit is meant to be a maximum incoming call charge of 0.19 euro per min, and a maximum outgoing charge of 0.43 euro per min.
At the moment the charges are about 10% higher, so it will not be a huge difference at first (unless you are a business customer or frequently go abroad), but still nice to have that price cut.
The big differences will be in the cost of SMS and packet data (internet, email, etc.), with SMS dropping from 0.28 Euros to only 0.11 per 160 characters, and a MB of packet data can be no more than 1 euro per MB.
From what I can see from the 2011 ‘predictions’, the cost will be even less, with outgoing calls down to 0.35 Euros and incoming calls of 0.11 Euros. So it’s getting to the point where it will not make a difference whether you are in UK or abroad, as mobile phone costs will be fairly similar.
And there are plans for a whole new money saving feature of international calls – the networks will have to cut off ALL calls that reach a cost of 50 Euros, so anyone making a long call will have to expect dropped lines, but it will prevent massive costs to those that forget to hang up when they finish speaking! These plans have not as yet been given a timescale for when it will be set up, but it seems that it will happen.
(all of the prices mentioned above are not inclusive of VAT)
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