Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“Nobody has been arguing that the network rates were silly high, or that something needed to be done about it, your point is absolutely valid. The points which were made related to enforcing same rate as national rates across the EU, which means that the networks have all just increased the national rates.”
If the networks put up national minute prices, I wouldn't disagree with this, what I do disagree with is the idea that non-roaming users would somehow be subsidising roaming users - the EU regulation doesn't 'cost' the networks anything other than a loss of crazy high margins i.e. if anything the roaming users were subsidising the non-roaming users and now they're no longer doing that the prices national are going up (which I would argue is, if anything, more fair). The roaming agreements were already set up years ago, and the billing issues are not really any different to those faced by MVNOs - yet MVNOs are still able to compete with MNOs suggesting the 'extra' billing 'cost' of this three party (user, MVNO and MNO, or user, home network and roaming network) billing arrangement are minimal.
However, I'm not 100% convinced prices will go up because of this - networks compete on national prices, which is why they were able to charge such high roaming prices (and why arguably the EU is right to intervene, as the market wasn't working for roaming - people picked a network based on its national pricing and then were stuck paying whatever that network wanted to charge them when they roamed). This is why networks do things like cut headline prices but raise the cost of non-headline prices (e.g. MMS) to crazy high amounts. In this case, MMS users are subsidising non-MMS users, just as roaming users were subsidising non-roaming users. However, the fact that there's competition in national pricing, whereas there wasn't in roaming, will help hold down costs.
My current contract with Vodafone is £20/month for 20GB of data, unlimited calls and unlimited SMS. This is cheaper than I've ever paid before, other than on the One Plan at £15/month with Three. Okay, the One Plan had unlimited data, but I never used more than 20GB/month on Three anyway. My Vodafone plan also includes 12-months Netflix, which I used to pay for anyway, so this is a real saving and if you take that off the £20/month in reality I'm paying less than I did with Three.
I'm sure there are examples of plans getting more expensive, and although the operators like to make a song and dance about how they're going to put 'have to' up headline prices (and of course making these threats suits their own interests), in my own case, at least, I'm paying less than I ever have.
When I first got a phone over a decade ago, Orange used to only charge 5pm an SMS as long as you topped up £50. They soon stopped this and you had to pay 10p/SMS unless you bought a bundle, this then went up to 12p. Of course, if you bought a bundle and sent enough texts, the effective cost per SMS was way less than 5p. Had prices gone up, or gone down? All this happened way before the EU started regulating EU roaming prices - the networks have been fiddling with their pricing way before this happened so even where you can see pricing changes I'm not convinced you can say this is definitely caused by EU roaming regulations.