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The European Commission's new plan on roaming
binary
21-09-2016
European Commission press release

BBC News article

In essence, the previously proposed 30/90 day limits on being able to 'roam like home' have been binned, and a more subtle approach implemented instead.

These measures should ensure that we can't all apply for super-cheap (e.g.) Lithuanian mobile contracts or PAYG plans, but do still need to have a provider from our 'home' country.
Gigabit
21-09-2016
But but...those bureaucrats don't care about consumers. All lobying isn't it in the EU.
Thine Wonk
21-09-2016
I don't think it's fair that somebody could buy a cheap plan from another tiny EU country with small coverage costs and maybe minimal investment and then use it in their home country 99% of the time, but starving their home country of investment and considering cost of service in the home country vs tiny country. Sounds like they have found a way which will ensure a minority aren't milking a loophole that the majority of mobile customer have to pay for in extra bills.

People belittle people arguing against some EU policies in a certain way, taking things out of context when the main objections are EU dominating laws and changing our way of life and getting involved in things that aren't to do with trade agreements like trying to set up an EU Army or agreeing compensation for US companies who lose out of revenue because of member state decisions etc.

I'm still not 100% sure this is a good thing for all consumers, many don't travel within the EU and will end up paying higher per minute rates (as they already have with the EU caps) to fund the people that do travel to the EU a lot (who arguably could have more money and could afford the £5 per day EU add-ons most networks sell).

The bottom line is this isn't a free gift from the EU, they aren't funding it, the consumer is just seeing a change to the way this is funded by regulatory force.
voodoofish
21-09-2016
Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“I'm still not 100% sure this is a good thing for all consumers, many don't travel within the EU and will end up paying higher per minute rates (as they already have with the EU caps) to fund the people that do travel to the EU a lot (who arguably could have more money and could afford the £5 per day EU add-ons most networks sell).”

This is what the networks would say, but to be honest I don't buy it. There's no real reason why roaming should cost more than using your phone in your home country. Okay yes the call might have to travel a bit further, but a call from Paris to London has to travel less far than a call from London to Edinburgh, and in the internet age distance shouldn't really impact the cost. Yes, there is going to be an extra party involved who wants to take a cut, but MVNOs are able to resell airtime at competitive rates so why when you go abroad should the fees suddenly increase dramatically?

What I think really happened is most networks knew most customers choose their network based on home coverage, costs etc. and don't take the cost of roaming into account. This meant they could get away with charging high rates for roaming - so they did. This meant they made huge profit margins from people when they went abroad and used their phones, and probably used these to subsidise their headline/home rates, which is what they competed on. So really you could argue the new regulations make things fairer, as roamers are no longer subsidising people who never leave their home market.

If I travel to Brazil with Vodafone, I pay £5/day to use my home allowance with WorldTraveller. If I go with EE, I pay £40 for 100MB. If you use 100MB/day (not a lot!), Vodafone is 8x cheaper than EE. There's no reason it should cost an EE customer 8x more than Vodafone - it's not like Vodafone own a network there and EE don't. The point I'm making is that what consumers are being charged for roaming often bears very little relation to the actual costs for the operators involved. The network operators have just been making huge profits for roaming. If a regulator stops them making huge profits from roaming, then to maintain the same level of profitability they need to raise profits elsewhere, but this isn't a case of everyone else being forced to subsidise roamers, it's actually a case of roamers no longer subsidising everyone else.
Thine Wonk
21-09-2016
The reason why it costs more is your network has to negotiate and set up contracts and roaming agreements with hundreds of third party networks and then do all the technical implementation, configurations and billing set up, and those networks also charge termination rates, which are wholesale costs to each other.

It is only fair that visitors pay a higher rate to temporarily use a foreign network just like any short term usage of a service is more expensive, they will allow you use use their foreign network, make international calls and then bill them back to your provider.

Within the same country things are a lot easier as you don't roam between networks, but I take your point on costs. However it will just mean the old cost will just be moved over and paid by customers on the per minute rates and contract prices, the operators will still want to make the same margin regardless.

The EU isn't gifting this or funding it, you're just moving the revenue for the operators from one area to another, under funding where there are legitimate extra costs and making non travellers pay more overall per minute.
d123
21-09-2016
Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“The reason why it costs more is your network has to set up and agree contracts and roaming agreements with loads and loads of third party networks and then have billing methods and configurations set up, and those networks also charge termination rates, which are wholesale costs to each other.

Within the same country things are a lot easier, but I take your point. However it will just mean the old cost will just be moved over and paid by customers on the per minute rates and contract prices, the operators will still want to make the same margin regardless.”

Those agreements are made, irrespective of whether it costs 1p a minute or £100 a minute and as the networks make reciprocal agreements the costs to them aren't that great, most roaming agreements were agreed a decade or more ago.

Sometimes it doesn't do to try and rationalise something at network level when you have no idea of the actual processes...

As an aside, what do you think the setup and wholesale costs will actually be between networks, as an example, between these networks?

Quote:
“Vodafone Albania
Vodafone Australia
Vodafone Czech Republic
Vodafone Egypt
Vodafone Faroe Islands
Vodafone Germany
Vodafone Ghana
Vodafone Greece
Vodafone Hungary
Vodafone Iceland
Vodafone India
Vodafone Ireland
Vodafone Italy
Vodafone Malta
Vodafone Netherlands
Vodafone New Zealand
Vodafone Portugal
Vodafone Romania
Vodafone Spain
Vodafone Turkey
Vodafone Qatar
Vodafone UK
Vodafone Ukraine”

It's funny how all the agreements between airlines for interoperability don't mean it costs far more to use them, for example the Star Alliance http://www.staralliance.com/en/member-airlines

You might like to try and be the voice of the networks, but sometimes it isn't quite what you think.
Thine Wonk
21-09-2016
I hate the way you patronise people D123 by saying things like your comment over the per minute costs when I had never claimed otherwise, as if you're pointing something out or correcting me. All costs to the networks are in place regardless of the pence per minute charge, backhaul, the towers, the cell equipment, engineering, on top of which you add your margin to formulate a retail price.

Internal UK costs are not the same as wholesale roaming costs as 2 companies have to make a margin on it, not just one. The costs are nowhere as much as they have been getting away with charging per minute no, but before the EU stepped in Vodafone and EE do european roaming for £5 a day or whatever and Three do many places at no extra cost, roaming add ons have been a feature for years bringing the costs down.

I'm not justifying the per minute rates, I'm simply saying that the EU is not funding this and that the networks will still make the same margins although they are being forced to charge all consumers the same now, even those that don't travel, which is really a form of subsidy as there are a lot of genuine costs associated with roaming albeit not as much as the per minute rates that they were charging.

Average non roaming customers are seeing price increases, if only to cover the loss of roaming revenue. Vodafone were blatant with it, the actual week the cap went to 15p Voda put per minute prices up by a large percentage, they did that twice, both in the exact same weeks the new EU caps came into force, others have done similar.

I notice you pick an example of the world's largest network by revenue to demonstrate the difficulty in setting up roaming agreements, a deliberately chosen unique example. What about the 100's of other mobile companies they have to negotiate with worldwide, and just because they are part of a group doesn't mean there's not loads of technical implementation and different billing systems in use for many of the individual counties.
d123
21-09-2016
Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“
Internal UK costs are not the same as wholesale roaming costs as 2 companies have to make a margin on it, not just one. The costs are nowhere as much as they have been getting away with charging per minute no, but before the EU stepped in Vodafone and EE do european roaming for £5 a day or whatever and Three do many places at no extra cost, roaming add ons have been a feature for years bringing the costs down. ”

You see, again you show your lack of knowledge of how things work.

You do realise that the majority of calls across the UK involve 2 companies (at least) and both make a margin on the call, not just one.

When you on Three call someone on EE (or BT, Telewest, o2, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone etc) you are starting your call on Three and then travelling out of their network, usually through the PSTN and back onto the terminating network.

That's why there is such a thing as termination charges on calls. Now add 0845, 0870 or 0800 calls or even international call and you get the idea of how many companies can actually be involved in that call you place in the UK on your mobile phone...
Thine Wonk
21-09-2016
Same network calls don't have termination rates and in the UK cross network are set by Ofcom and standard for all, no negotiation happens over wholesale price network to network in the UK, unlike elsewhere.

I should image technology wise it's all VOIP and they don't go via POTS anymore? although I don't know enough about how that aspect is handled. What I do know is that there are additional costs for international roaming, again not equivalent to the per minute rates, but more significant wholesale, legal, contract negotiations and billing related costs.

As usual you've successfully managed to nitpick at little bits of argument with minor wording or sections of a post to take the thread off topic and "what you want to argue about" rather than acknowledge many of the valid points which were made further up the page.
WelshBluebird
22-09-2016
Look, I am fine with roaming being a bit more expensive. What I am not fine with is how obscene the rates have been. There is no legitimate reason why the rates have been as expensive as they have been. It was price gouging, plain and simple. Why do you think networks are able to knock down high roaming bills when the media get involved? Simply because the profit they make on them is so high they can easily afford to do so if pressured! There is literally no way it costs £3 for one MB of data (what Vodafone charge for roaming in the USA if you don't buy their bundle thing). No way at all.
Thine Wonk
22-09-2016
Originally Posted by WelshBluebird:
“Look, I am fine with roaming being a bit more expensive. What I am not fine with is how obscene the rates have been. There is no legitimate reason why the rates have been as expensive as they have been. It was price gouging, plain and simple. Why do you think networks are able to knock down high roaming bills when the media get involved? Simply because the profit they make on them is so high they can easily afford to do so if pressured! There is literally no way it costs £3 for one MB of data (what Vodafone charge for roaming in the USA if you don't buy their bundle thing). No way at all.”

I agree, although for a long while now there have been cheap add-ons that give much lower options, and the European roaming spending cap, which meant you couldn't be charged more than a certain amount to prevent bill shock. I'm just not sure the latest plan is good for all customers, I think there's winners and losers and the losers are the majority who don't travel and use their phones within the EU.

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.
Yossi
22-09-2016
Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“The reason why it costs more is your network has to negotiate and set up contracts and roaming agreements with hundreds of third party networks and then do all the technical implementation, configurations and billing set up, and those networks also charge termination rates, which are wholesale costs to each other.

It is only fair that visitors pay a higher rate to temporarily use a foreign network just like any short term usage of a service is more expensive, they will allow you use use their foreign network, make international calls and then bill them back to your provider.

Within the same country things are a lot easier as you don't roam between networks, but I take your point on costs. However it will just mean the old cost will just be moved over and paid by customers on the per minute rates and contract prices, the operators will still want to make the same margin regardless.

The EU isn't gifting this or funding it, you're just moving the revenue for the operators from one area to another, under funding where there are legitimate extra costs and making non travellers pay more overall per minute.”

Oh yes, it costs so much for Vodafone UK to agree on roaming with Vodafone Spain.
Absolutaely. Or between O2 in the UK and Movistar in Spain.

Please.

The EU is doing the right thing within a single market: bringing down artifical borders in a Union where people move freely and are born in one country out of parents from other countries, grow up in another country, go study in a different country and go work in yet another country. Roaming so far was outrageously expensive because the market was controlled by cartels.
david16
24-09-2016
All these positive changes for uk comsumers will feel like it's been a total waste of time if once out of the EU, as well as roaming chages to come back, 0800 become chargeable again, plus all the various businesses and organisations returned to using expensive premium rate numbers again like 0844, 0845 or 0870 for customer services, with local and central government departments, gp and NHS services also getting in on the act.

It would feel like we have gone back several years to the dark ages if after the uk leave the EU, it's soon back to square one again where the UK was charging a lot more than anyone else in the EU for telecoms.
voodoofish
24-09-2016
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.
Gigabit
24-09-2016
Thine Wonk really has a bizarre response to this if he really is a consumer.
d123
24-09-2016
Originally Posted by Gigabit:
“Thine Wonk really has a bizarre response to this if he really is a consumer.”

He has an unusual attitude that the networks (well, mainly Three) need protection from the ire of the average customer and is possibly a voracious reader of promotional literature released by Three and CK Hutch..

Think of him as a new style of wavejock that's moved on from o2
Gigabit
24-09-2016
But wavejock you knew was a troll. The worrying thing is that I think Thine Wonk is deadly serious.
natbike
25-09-2016
Originally Posted by voodoofish:
“If I travel to Brazil with Vodafone, I pay £5/day to use my home allowance with WorldTraveller. If I go with EE, I pay £40 for 100MB. If you use 100MB/day (not a lot!), Vodafone is 8x cheaper than EE. There's no reason it should cost an EE customer 8x more than Vodafone - it's not like Vodafone own a network there and EE don't.”

However it is possible that Vodafone use there country coverage as a collective bargaining tool. If Vodafone setup an agreement with a provider in a country they don't have a network, they can still offer access to 50 other countries to acquire a better cost. EE can only negotiate based on one country, the UK.

I think EE have done well regarding roaming so far, but that's probably because they're lowering their margin than due to their bargaining power reducing costs.
voodoofish
08-10-2016
Originally Posted by natbike:
“However it is possible that Vodafone use there country coverage as a collective bargaining tool. If Vodafone setup an agreement with a provider in a country they don't have a network, they can still offer access to 50 other countries to acquire a better cost. EE can only negotiate based on one country, the UK.

I think EE have done well regarding roaming so far, but that's probably because they're lowering their margin than due to their bargaining power reducing costs.”

Well that's only really true since they were bought by BT - for years before then they could have done a reciprocal agreement with Orange/T-Mobile's network. Orange/T-Mobile own stakes in BT after the deal, so it could still be possible. Three has 'feel at home' in the USA even though its global network is far smaller than Vodafone's. When I was in Canada recently Rogers were advertising their own version of World Traveller, Roam Like Home. As far as I know they only operate in Canada, so it's possible for networks that only operate in a single country to negotiate better roaming deals too. Within the EU, the EU has helped out anyway by capping the wholesale costs operators can charge one another.
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