Roaming like at home

Do you remember when travelling to other EU countries, you were worried about how much credit you still had to be able to call home? Or when you returned you were welcomed by an envelope with a gigantic phone bill?

Thanks to the EPP Group, this is now in the past. Consumers will no longer have huge extra costs when paying for mobile calls, texts and data when they travel to another EU Member State.

We have ended the extra roaming payments when travelling in another EU country. It took a 10-year fight, but the EPP Group’s MEPs stood up for consumers and as of 15 June 2017, ‘Roam Like at Home’ has been reality.

What does it mean for you?

Besides no longer being afraid of huge phone bills because of roaming fees, we have also managed to get rid of (as of 15 May 2019) extra charges on so-called ‘intra-EU’ calls and SMS charges. They are now capped so that your calls between Member States are not excessively overpriced (intra-EU, cross-border calls capped at 19 cents per minute and 6 cents for text messages).

Getting rid of roaming charges for voice calls, text messages and data was an initiative by the European Parliament that benefits more than 500 million consumers as well as Europe’s Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups in all sectors of the economy. We believed it was an abuse of market power over consumers.

Studies show that the first results of ‘Roam Like at Home’ are extremely positive. The end of roaming charges has led to changes in the way Europeans use their mobile phones abroad. Europeans now aware of the scrapping of roaming costs, use mobile data while travelling just as often as they would at home. People are benefiting more and more from this, as can been seen from the fact that data traffic has increased enormously.

Fears that operators will abuse exceptions or raise domestic prices to compensate losses on roaming have been unfounded.

What did we achieve?

We succeeded in bringing down the current wholesale roaming charges (the prices operators charge each other when their customers use other networks when roaming in the EU). We succeeded in reducing the price caps for voice calls to €0.032 per minute and €0.01 for SMS messages. Data caps were set at €7.70 per gigabyte from 15 June 2017 and will decrease to €2.5 in 2022.

We fought for lower wholesale caps as the current price cap is at least 10 times higher than the cost price which is greatly disadvantageous to newcomers to the market - the mobile virtual network operators - who are dependent on the networks controlled by the old (incumbent) tele companies.

What we can still do for you

Abolishing roaming surcharges is only part of a broader strategy of the European Union to create a Digital Single Market and we will not stop here. We are going to demand further improvements in the wholesale roaming market to create a fully competitive market ready for 5G and the Internet of Things.