International Roaming Charges Revealed
Whilst I was watching Dispatches this evening a special entitled “The Mobile Phone Rip Off” I thought it would be best to share vital information about the cost of calls and texts whilst abroad in an EU country. This information is readily available from the network websites but isn’t always that easy to find, so as a quick reference it has been posted here.
Last year all the networks were forced into an agreement to reduce the cost of roaming whilst roaming in an EU country making it more cost effective for you, the consumer. Whilst there was a banding put in place for these calls most networks priced their calls towards the upper limit that the government set. Thus they were still making a huge profit from calls made by yourselves.
The call charges for each network are listed below to help you when you make an informed choice when picking your new mobile.
| Cost of Call | Cost to Receive Call | Text MSG | MMS MSG | Data Rates | |
| T-Mobile | 38p | 19p | 40p | 20p | £7.50/MB |
| Orange | 38p | 19p | 30p | 75p | £8/MB |
| Vodafone | 38p | 19p | 37p | 36p + Data | £8/MB |
| O2 | 35p | 18p | 25p | 25p | £7.05/MB |
| Virgin | 38p | 19p | 25p | 30p | £0.05/KB |
| 3 Mobile | 25p | 10p | 25p | 25p | £3/MB |
As you can see 3 Mobile have the cheapest rates and have really come well below the rate that was set by the government. Just so you know the official rate that networks had to stick to was 38p a minute to make a call and 19p a minute to receive a call. As you can see all the networks have stuck to this “guideline” with the exception of O2 shaving a couple of pence of and 3 Mobile reducing their cost by masses! There is still no official guidelines on what a text or picture message should cost. However all texts that are received abroad are free.
The government is currently in talks with the networks to reduce the cost of data charges whilst roaming abroad too, currently this can be extremely expensive when compared to the cost of data whilst in the UK. So we have included these in the above table as well. As you can see 3 Mobile again stick out with the lowest cost at only £3/MB.
