01 Jul 2009
The EU's mobile roaming legislation comes into effect today, with big reductions in charges for UK customers using their mobile phones in continental Europe.
But the news appears to have bypassed many people, as a survey of 2,000 UK mobile phone users showed that 62 per cent were completely unaware of roaming charges.
The initial 2007 EU ruling means that texting from abroad will be 60 per cent cheaper, the cost dropping to a maximum of €0.11 per SMS.
Making calls from abroad will be reduced by €0.03 to €0.43, while receiving a call will also drop €0.03 to €0.19. Mobile operators will also have to bill by the second rather than the minute.
Data download prices are also being cut from an EU average of €1.68 per megabyte to €1.
The reduced charges are viewed as a success for EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding, especially since the survey in June by market researcher Toluna for messaging company Acision suggested 75 per cent of customers believe they are over-charged when using their phone abroad.
The study also found that 42 per cent of customers would use their phone more if they were aware of their real-time spending, and 22 per cent want to use their phone more for social networking.
This is of course, good news. Two thoughts for the future:
1. Are further decreases going to be requested, as I think 1 euro per mb is still excessive and as mobile bandwidth improves, mobile roaming usage will increase
2. Anything we can do about the USA? I recently got seriously burned there - international rates there are extortionate.
Posted by: Phil 10 Jul 2009
[NOTE: The following includes a plug to my own site].
Viviane Reding and the EU have made good strides into reducing mobile phone roaming charges, but the cost of using the mobile internet is still very confusing for most mobile phone users in the UK.
Users don't understand the charging structures and there is still a significant variance in the costs applicable on the different tariffs.
For example, the cost for transferring 1MB of data per day for a month from a mobile phone ranges from £6/month to £210/month.
MobileMeg (http://www.mobilemeg.com) has been created to help reduce this confusion and provide clarity on the cost of the mobile internet.
The site includes a guide on mobile data services; a comparison of over 200 of the mobile phone price plans used in the UK, and a personal usage calculator to help estimate data charges.
Posted by: Peter Gross 06 Jul 2009
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