The EU's decision to act follows a two-year inquiry into the cost of roaming, which showed some mobile users in the UK are paying a small fortune to make and receive calls on their mobiles while on holiday elsewhere in Europe.
The cuts are significant. Under a three-year plan, the cost of making a mobile call anywhere in the EU will be capped at 33p a minute in year one. It will cost a maximum of 16p to receive a call. The costs should fall to about 31p and 15p respectively in year two, and 29p and 13.5p in year three.
The cap should make a big difference to British mobile users abroad. They currently have to pay up to £4.03 to make a four-minute call from Spain. Under the changes, the cost of the call would fall to £1.33.
The price caps will be reviewed in three years, at which point Brussels hopes that the market will have become more competitive, reducing prices further.
This is welcome news for mobile phone users. Networks have stalled for too long on lowering their roaming costs - perhaps not too surprising, as they have previously made vast and increasing profits from our international mobile calls.
The problem, however, is that these cuts are unlikely to come into effect until August, which means many of us who go on holiday before then could still face heavy bills. Moreover, texts are excluded from the deal, although the EU says it wants to come back to this subject 'soon'.
So what can you do to cut your EU roaming bills?
There are a few basic steps to take.
- Contact your network to get yourself registered to make calls abroad.
- Find out what your network charges if you make or receive calls while abroad.
- Sign up to that network's existing lower charges structure when using your mobile abroad. For example, Vodafone has a 'Passport' system that allows you to pay 75p and then chat away at the normal UK rate. O2 operates an International Traveller Service costing £2.99 a month, with discounts on calls made or received while abroad.
- If you plan on making lots of calls, or are taking a longer-than-usual holiday, purchasing a local country or global SIM card is another option. This is consistently cheaper than calling via one of the UK networks and could bring the cost of making a call from Europe down to just 22p per minute, with no charge to receive calls. Find out more about this here.
Full details on overseas mobile charges and what you can do about them can be found in a special guide to international roaming, available on our website.
Finally, if you are worried about the cost of calls, not just within Europe but in the UK too, maybe it's time you had a look at our mobiles comparison service, which has up-to-the-minute details of all the best deals currently available on the market.
DISCLAIMER: Please note that any rates or deals mentioned in this article applied at the time of writing and may no longer be available/applicable today.
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