Since the legislation came into force about a month ago, many UK mobile companies have made a song and dance about their new and cheaper roaming calls and sms prices (declaring them as if they decided to give their customers gift of cheap summer hoilday roaming calls) but……
… the significant reduction in data roaming costs has yet to be passed on to consumers.
If I’m using roaming data in France, O2 pays the French mobile company a max of €1 for every megabyte I use – this French company is providing all of the mobile infrastructure for me to do this – O2 still charges me £2.99 (€4) per megabyte, yet all they are providing is a billing process!(not the cell base stations or mobile 3G infrastructure)
You can now buy a £50 “bolt on” which gives you 50MB (ie £1 per megabyte) but its a fixed price so is clearly only this cheap if you use exactly 50MB – and you can’t buy more than one in month, so a high user is back up to the £2.99 per month for all data over 50MB.
O2 is by no means alone – in fact they are often the most forward thinking re roaming data – the industry continues to stunt it’s own potentially explosive growth.
Essentially they are still trying to get away with mugging roaming data users – the first company to see they can corner the market here will make a killing – but the fact that none has yet is very suspicious
our website is the worlds first complete ski resort guide designed from the start for mobile – as you imagine, when a Brit is skiing, they are probably in another country… roaming!
We have designed the site with tiny data size so our users can’t get a bill shock, but really it should be virtually free to surf a site with approx 20kb per page – in ANY country!
The EU rulings are certainly in the right direction (the phone companies proved they were not going to trade ethically on roaming data without outside legislation) but it neither goes far enough, nor is being implemented quickly enough.
The industry could easily have coped with the €0.5 euro per MB cap from the beginning and this rulin only serves to prolong the period in which operators can over charge their customers.
We’ll give updates on mobile roaming data charges and the prevention of bill-shock over the course of this year.
