Roaming charges will be completely abolished across Europe by mid-June 2017. | Larry W. Smith/EPA
Roaming rates drop across EU
Roaming to be abolished entirely by mid-June 2017.
Europeans can bid farewell to huge phone bills for using their mobiles in another EU country as new rules on roaming costs go into effect Saturday.
Mobile users will only pay an extra €0.05 per minute for each call and an extra €0.02 per SMS within the EU when traveling outside their home country. For data, users will pay an extra €0.05 per MB and domestic call and text volume will now be reduced when roaming. It’s a decrease of roaming charges of about 75 percent.
Earlier roaming caps were at €0.19 per minute for outgoing calls, €0.06 for SMS and €0.20 per MB of data used abroad in the EU.
“We’re in the home stretch now before the end of roaming charges in 2017,” European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip, who is responsible for the EU executive’s digitization strategy, said in a statement.
Roaming charges are scheduled to be abolished entirely across the EU by mid-June 2017.
“This is not only about Europeans saving money, this is about bringing down barriers in the Digital Single Market,” Ansip said.
Ending roaming charges has been a long and difficult struggle for the European Commission, which for years has been hitting walls over national concerns and objections by telecom operators. The EU institutions finally brokered a deal last June.
The changes in roaming costs come in parallel with new so-called net-neutrality rules, which will prevent Internet service providers from being able to slow down or block specific apps and websites, or prioritize some services’ traffic over others.
A version of this article was first published on POLITICO Pro April 29.
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