EU roaming charges are back – what are the best UK mobile networks for travellers?

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• Nick says:

  25 Jun25 June 08:47

  Oh brexit, the gift that keeps on giving. Isn’t it great that we ‘took back control’… and funny how the resident HfP bigots are quiet this morning!

  Another Three fan here. Never had a problem with speed, works fine in the US, and happy with UK coverage as well. Though I don’t often go to northern Scotland, where it’s apparently less good.

  • Ben says:

    25 Jun25 June 08:55

    I had a terrible time with three. Literally couldne get signal in my own house (london not northern scotland) but the wifi calling worked well. Switched to Voda and all is well again

    • bafan says:

      25 Jun25 June 12:47

      +1 Ben. I’m just outside of Richmond and had 1 bar at times. Went to Voxi and pay half the price and now have 3 bars. Three is ludicrously bad in most of London (Central used to show me full bars then not work mysteriously).

  • C says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:03

    Likewise – Three is very good in the US and Australia, and saved me a massive amount when there was a family emergency while I was in Indonesia a few years ago. The paid-for in country calls are minor — with free inbound calls and data-based calling services there are plenty of work around.

  • Tim says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:08

    No fan of Brexit. But the idea that Government should control the prices of phone calls in a competitive market was just plain stupid. the phone firms will need to make their money somewhere, and the EU free-roaming rule simply means that those who roam in the EU were being subsidised by those who stayed at home and those who roamed outside the EU.

    • BuildBackBetter says:

      25 Jun25 June 09:52

      +1. But why force people to learn the truth when it’s easy to blame others.

      • Rui N. says:

        25 Jun25 June 09:55

        Blaming others? Like you’ve done yesterday with immigrants?

      • Rob says:

        25 Jun25 June 10:13

        You do know, don’t you, that all of the UK supermarkets have a written deal with the Government to charge the same prices in all of their supermarkets across the UK, irrespective of where they are? If you live in a metropolitan area you are paying £’s more for your weekly shop to keep prices down in Lerwick. I don’t see you or indeed anyone complaining about that.

        • IanM says:

          25 Jun25 June 10:43

          That simply and obviously and legally isn’t the case

        • Rob says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:11

          It is – look it up.

          Tesco charges the same price in London and Lerwick in its supermarkets.

          The reason they do this is to avoid a Competition & Markets Authority investigation. There are many cities in the UK where one chain has a dominant position which would not normally be allowed. Due to this agreement they avoid forced divestments to competitors on the grounds that they can’t abuse their market position because UK prices are fixed nationally.

        • BuildBackBetter says:

          25 Jun25 June 10:59

          So u agree that travelers were being subsidised by locals so far?

        • Rob says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:04

          No, because that’s not how business works, if you’d ever tried to run one or indeed worked in one you would understand this.

          Each prong has its own price elasticity. You will maximise your pricing on every product. Returns are not capped so there is no need for cross-subsidy. We have hardly made a penny on flight or hotel sales for the last 18 months, but have we been able to demand more money off Amex or Virgin Money for pushing their cards? No, because they won’t pay it.

          Similarly, once we get flight and hotel revenue back, we’re not going to tell Amex that they can pay us less now because I’m not really bothered about maximising the profit that HfP makes and I don’t want to see poor Amex suffer. We will take everything we can get.

          Because the mobile networks operate under a Government licence, there is even less reason to cross subsidise. They have zero threat of someone coming in and undercutting them, because no newcomers are allowed into the market without buying spectrum.

        • Muzer says:

          25 Jun25 June 14:01

          Genuinely interested, do you have a source for this? All I found was a BBC News article saying they considered doing it but ultimately decided not to, and presumably that this threat was enough to persuade supermarkets to generally follow this policy. But I can’t find anything about an actual deal.

        • Rob says:

          25 Jun25 June 14:29

          It’s not enshrined in law, it has been agreed by ‘side letters’ given to the CMA I think. The last time it presumably came up was when Morrisons bought Safeway and decided to sell off various Safeway stores in areas where it wouldn’t have critical mass or which were seen as too posh for Morrisons.

        • David says:

          25 Jun25 June 14:44

          Not so sure that metropolitan strores are any more profitable when you include things like real estate costs, London wages, etc. It used to be said that the best turnover M&S per square foot was Inverness, but don’t know if that’s true. I’m fairly certain though that the rent is far lower than Oxford Street and the delivery trucks don’t have ULEV charges to get stuff up the A9.

        • Lord Doncaster says:

          25 Jun25 June 17:28

          There isn’t a Waitrose, Morrisons or Sainsbury’s in Lerwick though…

    • Alastair says:

      25 Jun25 June 10:42

      I am unconvinced that it actually costs anything more to use a British phone in France than it does in Britain, in the same way that there is zero cost difference in sending an email from London to Hong Kong as opposed to from London to Yorkshire. No one is subsidising travellers, like with cross border transaction fees, networks are making a profit off of this because it’s free money.
      Perhaps in the wilds of Canada or Australia there are genuine extra costs becuase of local market conditions – but I don’t believe for a minute that for most of the EU, this would apply.

      • Doug M says:

        25 Jun25 June 10:54

        Two companies want a slice of the pie. That infrastructure in France had to be paid for and maintained. Why would they allow UK networks free access?

        • Alastair says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:23

          But that’s the point – for example EE should just pay the French network for my usage, just like when you use a Visa card in France your bank clears it through Visa to whatever the aquiring bank in France is and charge 3%. The bank here just figured it could make 3% profit on this becuase, free money. There should be no actual extra ‘cost’ of this, EE would pay for access to France as much as it would pay to run its own network here (and usually it’s a third party anyway that’s actually running the masts and routing the packets). Why should EE be charging here for doing nothing?

      • Chas says:

        25 Jun25 June 11:38

        “I am unconvinced that it actually costs anything more to use a British phone in France than it does in Britain” – your logic is right, but from a UK customer perspective it is wrong. Let me explain:

        For UK network operators, it costs them significantly more when their customers use their phone in France, because the French network operator charges the UK company a wholesale price that is completely unrelated to the cost of using the network (in fact you could argue that the marginal cost of using the network is £nil). Because of this high wholesale rate, the UK operator then has to charge more unless it wants to use other products to cross-subsidise the loss it would make on Roaming.

        The problem is the high wholesale rates charged between network operators. which is why going back 15-20 years Christine Lafarge in the role she held in the EU at the time, initially tried to regulate the wholesale inter-operator rate, and when that didn’t fully work she then moved to regulate the retail price to consumers.

        I haven’t worked in the industry for quite some time now, but my understanding of the situation is that now that the UK has left the EU, the EU network operators are no longer regulated on the amount that they can charge UK network operators for their roaming traffic, and so will have hiked those prices. And to mitigate the loss they will be making on this traffic, UK networks are now looking to raise the charges. There is nothing the UK can do to force cheaper wholesale prices from their EU counterparts, with the exception of striking decent commercial deals such as guaranteeing a certain volume of traffic in return for discounts, or giving decent prices for any roaming traffic those EU operators send to the UK. But in the covid environment, no-one sensible is going to make any volume commitments on roaming traffic. Sorry for the long-winded response, but that’s my take on it.

        • Alastair says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:56

          Thank you very much for this information – of course, I was being idealistic I guess, all of these higher charges are just companies looking to print money, there is no technical reason why the costs should increase. I find it interesting to contrast to the internet model of things where at the major international level, peering is settlement free by design.

      • Lady London says:

        25 Jun25 June 15:22

        +1
        The game in mobile is all about high fixed costs/barriers to entry and money is made on marginal costs which most of the time are nothing

        What’s p***ing me off is how all the networks said they weren’t planning to reintroduce EU roaming charges. In the last 12-18 months or so swingeing increases (eg Three) and punitive automatic annual contract cost ratcheting (Three, contracts now auto increase annually by 4.5% =plus= inflation). Yet now 6 months after all networks were sanctimoniously saying no plans to bring back EU roaming charges here they all are out of the racehorse starting gates doing it.

        Lead times in the mobile phone industry are longer than six months so this was definitely planned.

        • Chas says:

          25 Jun25 June 16:57

          Couldn’t agree more. When they all said that they had no plans to re-introduce roaming charges, all I could smell was BS.

    • Doug M says:

      25 Jun25 June 10:50

      Agree Tim. No fan of Brexit but hammering away at roaming costs is trivial. If you can afford to travel you can afford a few quid for roaming charges.

      • NFH says:

        25 Jun25 June 11:12

        It’s not a question of affording, but a question of justifying.

        • Doug M says:

          25 Jun25 June 13:31

          It needs no justification. You can use Wi-Fi for free, not use the phone at all, or pay. It’s a choice.

      • Lady London says:

        25 Jun25 June 15:26

        not that easy or that cheap Doug. There are many inconveniences and traps for the unwary.

  • Paul Pogba says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:13

    I voted remain but are you sure we should have transferred significant sovereign powers in exchange for regulated mobile phone packages? Is that really why the metropolitan elite were so incensed?

  • Tim says:

    25 Jun25 June 10:45

    Different Tim here. Ex-EU relatively low level employee. In addition to salary, all EU employees used to get a fixed payment of at least 1,300 EUR for popping down to Strasbourg each month, which many used to fund second homes. We also used to get a 400 EUR allowance per month for mobile costs. This was 2011 ish. I took out a U.K Orange contract which had a £75 extra 50gb data bundle for E.U. use. My bills went down from 350 EUR to 150 EUR. In my own little way I thought I was helping save taxpayers a bit of cash. The driver of the EU mobile regulation, in my view, was not a single market issue, but a consequence of the massive bills EU employees were getting above 350 EUR that they could not claim for….

• IanM says:

  25 Jun25 June 08:48

  I used to use Roam Mobility in the USA, a canadian operator that gave you a US mobile number on a PAYG basis. Unfortunately Covid put paid to that – anyone else know of a similar setup?? Ting took them over but only offer plans.

  • bafan says:

    25 Jun25 June 12:51

    T-Mobile do E-SIMS but they aren’t particularly cheap.

  • GeorgeJ says:

    25 Jun25 June 13:29

    Worldsim offer something similar. Basically a PAYG with service agreements in most of the world, Belize is the only place I have been where they had no counterparty. You can have a UK or US (and a few others) numbers. It is good for voice with free incoming or low cost outwards. I add their cheap data packages when I need them for specific journeys., just used in Greece and cost is well under the GBP2 per day being quoted by EE (and I was running maritime Navionics app).

• Julian says:

  25 Jun25 June 09:06

  Change by EE to £2 per day in the EU looks incredibly unfriendly and exploitative. But entirely typical of the thinking of the directors of the BT group along with their 24 month minimum contracts on home broadband.

  Also seems incredibly disappointing a deal wasn’t negotiated on mobile roaming with the EU as part of BREXIT. BREXIT situation looking worse and worse with Merkel trying to impose 14 day quarantine on arriving Brits, although don’t think Spain, Portugal and Greece will play ball but surprisingly Italy has done.

  Seems I am stuck with staying with O2 then as although I could use 4G Calling and Wifi Calling in my home on my One Plus N10 Nord handset on Three their signal out and about in the sticks here on the Surrey/West Sussex border is absolutely abysmal

  The most disturbing thing of all is not just that the concept of Roaming is now returning for travel within the EU but also the disturbingly high level of charges still being made to roam per day or outside data bundles………

  Another possible option not discussed is to acquire an EU Pay As You Go SIM and then activate a data plan on that for a month when travelling across other EU countries. I had one with Orange Spain but unfortunately lost when my mobile recently disappeared (lost rather than stolen) but I think I can buy another SIM on Ebay and then link it with my existing Orange Spain mobile online account.

  • Tim says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:11

    No deal with the EU is needed for the UK government or regulator to simply cap or abolish roaming charges. But why should EU-roamer get preferential treatment over other phone users?

    • Will says:

      25 Jun25 June 09:21

      One would hope that free roaming globally was an aspiration to work towards, so given it was already free to the EU, nailing that down would be a good start point to moving on.

      Even if not free it’s ridiculous that you can buy a local sim on arrival in many places much cheaper than multi nationals are able to offer/negotiate.

      The only explanation is that it’s exploitative.

      Be interesting to see roaming revenue vs profit margin for phone operators.

      • BuildBackBetter says:

        25 Jun25 June 09:53

        Making roaming free is just pushing up the cost domestically

        • IanM says:

          25 Jun25 June 09:58

          What utter bollox, so you are saying now that roaming charges are back the networks will cut prices in the UK. hahaha dream on.

        • NFH says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:35

          Nobody is suggesting that EEA roaming should be free, but instead that it should be charged at UK domestic prices, maintaining the status quo. UK domestic prices are sufficient to cover the wholesale costs of EEA roaming.

        • Alastair says:

          25 Jun25 June 11:40

          How do you think the internet works then? Should people who only access locally hosted British websites pay less than those who visit American ones? Are you aware you are subsidising those undersea cables to foreign places with your home broadband connection?

        • will says:

          25 Jun25 June 15:05

          When you have a vodafone UK sim, and it connects to Vodafone mast in a non UK country I very much doubt it costs Vodafone anything at the margin.

          I accept that where cross network arrangements are required there may be an additional cost, but this cost is usually disproportionate compared to buying a local sim and I don’t believe I’ve got more purchasing power walking into a local shop than a huge multi national phone network offering to connect it’s users to the local mast.

          I suspect the reality is that these arrangements are in place but the big phone companies are pocketing the high fees because they can.

          Realistically, how many people can be bothered to change their sim and number for a week vs sucking up £50-100 in roaming charges.

          Needs regulation, just cap charges at local operator rate + say 10%, would be easy to do globally as charges are transparent in all countries.

          If anything a lot of under developed countries where the charges are highest if you have a UK sim are some of the cheapest places to use a local sim.

        • Lady London says:

          25 Jun25 June 15:29

          no connection BuildBackBetter

• ZF says:

  25 Jun25 June 09:21

  Nothing about them introducing the ” yay free roaming” marketing campaigns they did although the it was the EU that made them do it a few years back. Less of an impact for me as I have an EU sim, but still sucks.
  As a comparison, my EU sim gave the UK their 3rd world country tariffs on the 1st of Jan, without warning, so even less “customer friendly”, but I guess its different as its a change of 1 country vs. 27.

• David says:

  25 Jun25 June 09:24

  Thanks Brexit, and all who voted for her.

  • Definitas says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:39

    I’m surprised how many people who are supposedly interested in global travel are still wittering on about Brexit. We would all be still enjoying far better credit card deals if the EU hadn’t pulled the rug from under us. As for free roaming in the EU, are people so naive that they didn’t realise that charges already reflect their “free” allowance – there is no such thing as a free roam. Meanwhile, as soon as free EU roaming was introduced, my charges in the US almost doubled because Vodafone immediately changed their US business model. Politicians love to tinker round the edges of commerce, particularly Eurocrats who don’t need to worry about getting re-elected. However, in the end, market forces always win out. Companies will maximise their profits and will always outwit politicians, the majority of whom have little or no business acumen.

    • Rui N. says:

      25 Jun25 June 09:46

      You know the UK was the one that pushed for the EU to limit credit card fees, right? And you know that UK telcos gained financially from the free roaming right? It was the ones from southern Europe that lost (as they receive many more tourists).

      • BuildBackBetter says:

        25 Jun25 June 09:56

        U really think uk telecoms paid nothing to Southern Europe telecoms?

    • Rob says:

      25 Jun25 June 09:51

      No, the UK put forward the credit card fee capping legislation and talked the rest round.

    • The Savage Squirrel says:

      25 Jun25 June 13:34

      “We would all be still enjoying far better credit card deals if the EU hadn’t pulled the rug from under us.”
      You do know that (if everything else is the same) that higher card fees just translate directly to higher prices at the till? Do better credit card deals outweigh this? Maybe, but in the absence of 0.3% cap, you’re certainly not getting those better deals at no additional cost.
      It’s hard to argue that the population as a whole aren’t far better off for the 0.3% cap, while card companies seem to generate more than adequate profits. Despite my very strong anti-regulation free-trade leanings, I’d say it’s one area that was not competitive and where regulation seemed justified and has worked well.

  • David says:

    25 Jun25 June 18:43

    Definitas: thank you for so succinctly evidencing in one post the stupidity of the Brexit vote being based entirely on a mountain of lies, half truths, misinformation and misunderstanding.

• Aston100 says:

  25 Jun25 June 09:40

  Still not sure what tangible benefits we achieved as a result of Brexit.

  • TM says:

    25 Jun25 June 09:43

    The only noticeable benefit I have come across is tax free shopping

    • Rob says:

      25 Jun25 June 09:50

      … but you’ve lost duty free shopping.

      And you still need to pay tax when you bring items back to the UK.

      • Yorkieflyer says:

        25 Jun25 June 11:21

        Blue passport?

      • TM says:

        25 Jun25 June 11:32

        Maybe only benefits for me then. Only really interested in cigars purchased in EU

    • Rui N. says:

      25 Jun25 June 10:06

      Like Lord Frost said yesterday, the benefits of Brexit are self-evident. Which is the kind of answer you give when you can’t list any.

      • IanM says:

        25 Jun25 June 10:27

        +1

        Benefits for the Tories and their mates are self evident

        • Doug M says:

          25 Jun25 June 13:32

          Yet people still vote for them, and I suspect right now they’d win another election by a country mile.

      • Lord Doncaster says:

        25 Jun25 June 17:32

        Hmmm it’s nice to see everyone here trying to justify the existence of the EU and the immigration inequality the trade bloc has helped flourish.

        Why do all the EU apologists want to treat one set of foreigners more favourably than the rest?

  • marcw says:

    25 Jun25 June 10:16

    Blue passport!

    • Sandra says:

      25 Jun25 June 12:00

      I imagine that once (if) travel gets back to normal the DM (other similar publications available) will be full of stories of incensed Brits, on their annual holiday to France, Italy, Spain etc, who voted for Brexit complaining that they now have to join the none EU traveller queue where the officer(s), as I can’t imagine they’ll want to make it easy or fast by having a shedload of staff running it, were so slow it took absolutely ages to gain entry. But it won’t be their vote leave that’s changed the goalposts and meant they can’t join the fast moving EU queue, it will be ‘Johnny Foreigner’ or some similar derogatory phrase, who’s incompetent.

      • Lord Doncaster says:

        25 Jun25 June 17:34

        Sandra

        Many holiday destinations in Europe have non-existant queues for non-EU travellers. Alicante? Malaga? Nice?

        • Sandra says:

          25 Jun25 June 19:20

          Maybe now, but once travel resumes fully they might suddenly decide they need to check those British passports and stamp everyone of them!

        • Lord Doncaster says:

          26 Jun26 June 14:12

          Usually the e-gates are flooded with EU nationals in EU holiday hotspots. The manual passport queue is usually empty.

  • Ash says:

    26 Jun26 June 08:50

    We won’t be paying £15.5 billion

• Doug says:

  25 Jun25 June 09:45

  Is there any Uk mobile operator offering eSims?

• Rui N. says:

  25 Jun25 June 10:00

  Maybe you should learn how it worked before asking silly questions? All the operators in Southern Europe pushed against free roaming because of how they would lose money. It was the rich countries in Central and Northern that pushed for it, as their citizens and operators would gain the most from it.

  • Rui N. says:

    25 Jun25 June 10:01

    This was for our BBB above.

  • BuildBackBetter says:

    25 Jun25 June 11:05

    How it worked before is nice to know but irrelevant now. What matters is how much do uk networks pay the European networks now. That’ll tell us if they are passing on costs with a margin or it’s daylight robbery.

  • Chas says:

    25 Jun25 June 11:48

    Actually, I don’t think air was the “rich countries in central and northern” Europe that wanted it – I know of many operators, including those in Belgium who were completely against it. It was the pet project of EU politicians who were desperate to prevent roaming charges from people who lived and worked in a cross-border manner (France to Belgium, Germany to Belgium, France to Germany etc)

  • Muhammad Abdullah says:

    25 Jun25 June 12:15

    That’s just the EU all over… created to further the founding MS. It’s basically just about the original ECSC members

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