UK Network Operator EE to Charge Customers for Roaming Within the EU

[axantas]

So much for protecting consumer’s interests; this is purely licence to raise that price upwards arbitrarily!!?

Yes we can...
You do not like to be our customer? Go elsewhere. We will not notice it and we will not miss you...
We will certainely not say that, just take it as reality behind the shiny and colorful brochures.

 

[Internaut]

The charges don’t look to bad. As con-sequences of the coup go, I’d say these are the least of our worries.

 

[macbookfan]

That alone would have almost certainly not been enough, but you are on the right track for sure... Had the Remain campaign really focused on the positives of being in Europe, the UK would not have left. The mistake was basing a campaign on "Project Fear," and "Poor little Britain cannot possibly manage without Europe." That was a catastrophic error of judgement, because nothing annoys the Brits more than that sort of message. It was the Brits' belligerent attitude that saw them through the darkest days of WWII when all seemed hopeless. Tell the British people they can't, and they will stick their fingers up and get on with it. That's what they do (or did). It is sad that the people leading the Remain campaign did not understand the nature of their own people, because had they not made that error, we would no longer even be talking about boring Brexit.

To be fair the brits probably would have lost the war if the US didn’t get bombed at pearl. Wasn’t going too well before the backup arrived. Attitude or not.

 

[twistedpixel8]

You sure you'll rejoin?

Scotland might if that angry little woman gets her way.

 

[twistedpixel8]

To be fair the brits probably would have lost the war if the US didn’t get bombed at pearl. Wasn’t going too well before the backup arrived. Attitude or not.

Shhhh, they don’t like it when you remind them America saved the day.

“No they didn’t! We were doing just fine! We didn’t need your help!”

 

[BlueMoose]

To be fair the brits probably would have lost the war if the US didn’t get bombed at pearl. Wasn’t going too well before the backup arrived. Attitude or not.

*tinfoil hat on*

there were(are?) conspiracy theories that claimed British naval veterans "nudged" the Japanese navy boys to consider attacking US naval "interests" in the Pacific(including the Philippines, Hawaii and even California)... with the goal of drawing the United States into total war with the Axis nations.(Germany, Japan, Italy)

Many Japanese officers and veterans of that era were all trained by the British navy or had close ties.... so they were "encouraged" to use their influence....

whether this really happened or not, nobody knew... however, one thing was for sure... without the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would not have devoted the entire country into helping UK/Europe and Asia fight against Germany and Japan.

*tinfoil hat off*

 

[CausticSoda]

To be fair the brits probably would have lost the war if the US didn’t get bombed at pearl. Wasn’t going too well before the backup arrived. Attitude or not.

Probably? The Brits would most certainly have lost the war in the US had not entered! The period I was referring to in particular is when it was surrounded by an occupied Europe, bombed daily, practically wiping out some cities and it was a bloody-minded spirit that meant the people were not broken and managed to hang in there. Even after the US entered the war, the UK still suffered a direct onslaught for years.

 

[Stridr69]

I wish that were true. It depends on the T-Mobile plan. I have a friend on my account who gets charged roaming in the Caribbean unless it is specifically blocked. Take a look at their support page on international roaming.

Yes, some of their plans DO have roaming fees. The plan I have dates back to 2015 and even THAT plan has changed. I DO believe you can get an international plan with no roaming fees for around $70-80 per month. I haven't looked because I don't need to.

 

[Stridr69]

T-Mobile only has a presence in 4 EU countries. There's 27 EU states + 3 more that are part of the roaming agreement. 13% are covered with a network owned or controlled by T-Mobile.

EDIT: Looks like T-Mobile has a bigger share than I thought, but it still represents a minority, less than 1/3 of states involved.

T-Mobile U.S. customers have free roaming throughout the E.U. from what i gather from their website.

 

[JungeQuex]

A small price to pay to be out of that bloc, though that bloc isn't going to exist in the next couple of decades. They are either going to have to fully integrate everyone, or it will break apart. That is a fact. The problem is that they will not be able to integrate everyone. I absolutely do not see Italy going quietly into such a system, or much of France for that matter. Central or Eastern Europe? Forget about it. There is no way they would sacrifice their own governments in lieu of the one in Brussels.

These nationalist governments that are forming will eventually say "to heck with the EU gibs" and go form some nationalist confederacy amongst themselves with some kind of shared currency outside of the Euro system. In a lot of cases these countries haven't even adopted the Euro yet (Poland, Czechia, Hungary etc) - so it's going to be even easier.

So whatever people say about people voting to rejoin the bloc or whatever, good luck - because it is not going to be around to join forever.

 

[827538]

T-Mobile U.S. customers have free roaming throughout the E.U. from what i gather from their website.

Interesting, I'm with a T-Mobile MVNO in the US as US cell plans are stupidly overpriced compared to my UK plan.

 

[827538]

A small price to pay to be out of that bloc, though that bloc isn't going to exist in the next couple of decades. They are either going to have to fully integrate everyone, or it will break apart. That is a fact. The problem is that they will not be able to integrate everyone. I absolutely do not see Italy going quietly into such a system, or much of France for that matter. Central or Eastern Europe? Forget about it. There is no way they would sacrifice their own governments in lieu of the one in Brussels.

These nationalist governments that are forming will eventually say "to heck with the EU gibs" and go form some nationalist confederacy amongst themselves with some kind of shared currency outside of the Euro system. In a lot of cases these countries haven't even adopted the Euro yet (Poland, Czechia, Hungary etc) - so it's going to be even easier.

So whatever people say about people voting to rejoin the bloc or whatever, good luck - because it is not going to be around to join forever.

Countries like Poland and Hungary are in pretty much open revolt to the EU and protect each other from the EU taking action, it's great to see and shows how useless the EU is.

The EU will fall apart due to basic economic fundamentals, it was inevitable the day they adopted the Euro. The out of touch regime, mass uncontrolled immigration, rising poverty, and falling living standards just accelerate the inevitable.

 

[827538]

Yes, some of their plans DO have roaming fees. The plan I have dates back to 2015 and even THAT plan has changed. I DO believe you can get an international plan with no roaming fees for around $70-80 per month. I haven't looked because I don't need to.

My UK plan is £20 a month and is better than anything I can get in the US with 200GB of 5G data and up until this, free EU roaming. Still, £10 a month to use my phone abroad is peanuts. My US plan is $25 a month and it's 10GB 5G. Everything is cheaper in the US except for ISP's and cell providers.
My houses in the UK and US cost me about the same for internet but one gets unlimited gigabit speeds and the other is 200Mb Comcast with a 1.2TB limit. I really hate regulatory capture.

 

[H2SO4]

Give it time, the £2 a day will turn into a £10 monthly pass, that'll turn into a freebie add-on much like the US, Aus & NZ as we have now, honestly nothing to see here, it's a bit like folk moaning it costs 60p/min to make a call when everyone on set minutes or unlimited packages aren't affected. All networks said pre-Brexit they had no plans to change EU roaming now they do, things change.

I think the important part is in the wording.
I have 'no plans to', do any hard work today but it doesn't mean I'm not going to.

 

[H2SO4]

Because in 2018 a total 41.7 Americans traveled overseas 1 or more times (of which the vast majority traveled only once). That is under 13% of all Americans. Even if everyone of those people was a T-Mobile customer (something that is obviously not the case), that would mean fewer than 25% of their customers would have traveled outside the country more than once in a year. Given the far more likely scenario of those people being split fairly evenly among the big three, that would drop that to about less than 9%.

EU roaming matters to people in the EU because the countries are so small. We have not had roaming charges in the U.S. for years, which is geographically about the same size as Europe. It just is not a big deal to most Americans.

None of that proves anything except that you have done some maths. You don't know what if any deals they may have had with foreign operators, what tax deals they may have had with foreign governments and myriad other possibilities.

 

[frifra]

In canada, you get charged for roaming accross the other side of the country lol…the same country!

fyi canada is the number 1 place for hightest phone bills in the world

In Canada you get charged for receiving phone calls. That is the real crime.


About EE: Thanks Boris! What else is improving?

 

[threesixty360]

It would be righteous also hold sections of the media accountable. For example, a story like this, that posits a 3-6% decrease in GDP whilst being docilely absorbed by millions of citizens during peak Brexit anxiety, was actually emphatically false and stayed broadly within the same range as other comparable economies.

So, truths, or perceived truths aren’t actually true in some cases, because many people are deriving their truths from objectively false information. Employment grew after Brexit, wages stagnated somewhat due to inflation, house prices are still rising, the only Armageddon we had was from a virus.

- Someone who voted remain.

From your own link:

• GDP is roughly 2.5–3.0% (£55–£66 billion) below where we think it would have been without Brexit. Based on pre-crisis forecasts and global economic performance in 2017 and 2018, we suspect the UK has missed out almost entirely on a bout of global growth, which would normally have boosted exports and investment

i think you forget that sterling dropped from 1.49 vs usd to as low as 1.21 or something. So you can look at percentages which tell one story or look at actual value of cash and see atcompletely different one. We lost a lot of money in that Brexit period in reality. We literally could import less for our money for years. And for a country that imports nearly half its food etc... thats not good.

it feels like youre post is the type I’m worried about. Your saying one thing but the material you link to is saying something else…

 

[threesixty360]

The biggest broadcasters by far in the UK were overwhelmingly pro-EU. The BBC which has a mandate to be impartial was anything but. Not even the most pro-EU supporter can claim the majority of media was pro-Brexit. Outside of a few news papers it was nothing but project fear.

Also the lies that came out of project fear that never materialized were ridiculous. The left seem to think that those who voted in favor of Brexit were misinformed and that if 'we had the facts' we would've chosen to remain. I totally disagree. It boiled down to we want to be in control of our own nation and to leave a completely undemocratic EU. The remainers have never gotten over losing and thus have to think that Brexit happened because of some bus slogan or some unfilled promise.

It was down to a condescending Europhile London elite who looked down on and mocked ordinary working people as stupid, thick, xenophobic, racist etc and an understanding that the EU is an undemocratic institution that doesn't listens to us. Simple as that. Those issues dwarf any roaming fees.

Also before you lump me in with the stupid thick people who didn't know what they were voting for. I lived in Germany, I speak German, I travel the world, I am now married to a non-Brit and living in the US. I have an MSc in EEE from one of the worlds best engineering schools. There's a large anti-EU sentiment in Germany and much of Europe and it's going to fail eventually, the currency alone would be its downfall.

Here we go again lol!

as I said , I would prefer that there was truth on both sides of the debate. your post kind of implies that only one side was lying. I am saying that how can we have democracy if any side of the debate can get away with lying?

the bbc maybe the biggest broadcaster in the U.K. however most people (as you I’m sure you know ) get their news from the internet of which the Mail and the other pro eu media groups are far ahead of the only major pro remain publication (guardian). The murdoch group of papers were all pro Brexit. Not to mention Cambridge analytica + facebooks well publicised “work” in promoting pro brexit views.

the most damning thing about all this though is actually “time” itself. Time tells you what actually happenEd. Witness the deal we managed to get is far from the complete divorce on our terms that pro brexiters said was easy to get. (I think Johnson described Mays deal as ”vassalage” yet then proceeded to promote pretty much the exact same deal , a worse deal in fact when he got in power) the fishing community seem To have been stitched up. Witness the complete faf and lies over n,Ireland. and can I forget the 300m for the nhs which after their stellar COVID response are set to get ridiculously low salary rises.

none of this will effect the “travel the world, multi lingual, msc engineering graduate types“ who can sit in their ideological bubble relatively unaffected by any of this. For those people Brexit is just a game. For others in the working classes who have far more to lose, less see if it’s just a game shall we?

 

[Alan Wynn]

None of that proves anything except that you have done some maths. You don't know what if any deals they may have had with foreign operators, what tax deals they may have had with foreign governments and myriad other possibilities.

Let us recap this conversation:

You said:

Have they already done the maths and adjusted your price in advance to suit?

Which I took to mean, are they charging a meaningful additional for their service because they offer free SMS and data roaming on other T-mobile international systems.

To which I responded:

Not really. They understand that very few of their customers ever roam overseas, so they can advertise it as a benefit that will never be used. Also, most (if not all) of the systems in most (if not all) of the countries for which they support free data roaming are T-Mobile, so will there will be no charge to them for it.

In other words, this is a feature a very small percentage of their customers ever use, and those who do use it, do so for a few days a year, mostly on to other systems they own.

You then said:

How do you know that?

Which I took to mean: How do I know that very few of their customers use it? However, I can also say that I know they support roaming mostly to systems they own (or are affiliates) because have looked at the list of countries where they support this and verified that most of them have T-mobile owned or branded systems.

To which I responded:

Because in 2018 a total 41.7 Americans traveled overseas 1 or more times (of which the vast majority traveled only once). That is under 13% of all Americans. Even if everyone of those people was a T-Mobile customer (something that is obviously not the case), that would mean fewer than 25% of their customers would have traveled outside the country more than once in a year. Given the far more likely scenario of those people being split fairly evenly among the big three, that would drop that to about less than 9%.

EU roaming matters to people in the EU because the countries are so small. We have not had roaming charges in the U.S. for years, which is geographically about the same size as Europe. It just is not a big deal to most Americans.

To which you responded that this does not prove anything. I am not sure how showing that the number of Americans that travel overseas is a small percentage of T-mobile USA’s customers and that most of that small percentage only go for a short time, does not demonstrate that very few of their customers will take advantage of this feature and so they do not need to meaningfully raise their prices to cover it (especially given that they primarily do it with other systems they own).

However, if you are actually asking if I have verified all of T-mobile’s internal costing analyses and reviewed their internal roaming agreements, to guarantee that my statement is not just highly probable conjecture based on publicly known facts, the answer is: I have not.

 

[Alan Wynn]

In Canada you get charged for receiving phone calls. That is the real crime.

Why is that a crime? You are using scarce resources when you make or receive a call. There is a benefit to the recipient (who can choose whether to answer or not), to make calling them as painless as possible.

Caller pays can also be a reasonable option, but neither is without downsides.

 

[alFR]

the China virus

It's actually called COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2... I think your calling it that instead tells us everything we need to know about pro-Brexit people, to be honest.

 

[laptech]

What EE is doing is nothing more than a money grab. The UK communications regulator OFCOM had warned mobile phone operators to get their act together over roaming charges or they will do it for them. As it happened the regulator forced the mobile phone operators to act because they were not doing it. The mobile phone operators resisted heavily but in the end complied. Now that the UK is out of the EU, the agreements the UK telcos had with the EU no longer apply. The UK mobile phone operators have hated the roaming restrictions placed upon them by OFCOM because let's face it, they were ripping off UK customers with their roaming charges.

Now the UK is out of the EU, the mobile phone operators can legally reintroduce roaming charges again. Now that EE have publicly said they will introduce a roaming fee, I have no doubt the rest will follow using the same excuse 'the fee is introduced to support investment'.

Remember, the wording from EE says they will charge £2 for roaming, it does not say anything about what the individual costs of the calls will be. So could this be a charge of £2 for the privilage of having access to roaming within the EU and then be charged a higher fee on international calls because that is how they did it in the past, international calls to the EU were charged higher.

 

[Falhófnir]

Probably? The Brits would most certainly have lost the war in the US had not entered! The period I was referring to in particular is when it was surrounded by an occupied Europe, bombed daily, practically wiping out some cities and it was a bloody-minded spirit that meant the people were not broken and managed to hang in there. Even after the US entered the war, the UK still suffered a direct onslaught for years.

Define 'lost the war' - after the Battle of Britain consensus is Hitler had permanently lost his chance of invading Great Britain itself. He also offered a favourable peace settlement, basically the British Empire exited the war and were left alone, while Hitler got a free hand to turn to the USSR. Even then, it's also settled that Hitler would never have had the manpower to decisively defeat the Soviets, even if both Britain and the US were out of the war. Basically the war was already lost for the Nazis by the end of 1941. The difference the US' direct involvement made was reducing the casualties incalculably. So no, the British Imperial forces alone wouldn't have been able to liberate Europe, but nor was the British Empire itself ever really in peril after 1940 (with the exception of some Asian colonies under threat from the Japanese) and Hitler would have eventually dashed himself against the Soviets in an unimaginable blood bath anyway.

 

[axantas]

Countries like Poland and Hungary are in pretty much open revolt to the EU and protect each other from the EU taking action, it's great to see and shows how useless the EU is.

The EU will fall apart due to basic economic fundamentals, it was inevitable the day they adopted the Euro. The out of touch regime, mass uncontrolled immigration, rising poverty, and falling living standards just accelerate the inevitable.

You did not mention, what is going on in these two countries and what they are fighting...
You may support that development in Poland and Hungary yourself, but it is NOT the freedom, the EU stands for. So if they leave the EU and turn back to the middle ages - let them go...

 

[827538]

It's actually called COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2... I think your calling it that instead tells us everything we need to know about pro-Brexit people, to be honest.

The virus came from Chinese scientists in a Chinese lab. I'll call it the China virus if I please.