By Leo Stiles
Coming home from a holiday is always a bit of a downer, with thoughts of returning to work and the Irish weather reminding you why you went abroad in the first place. As bad as this can be, the worst part is always the colossal phone bill that you racked up from making just a handful of calls home.
Despite years of complaints, mobile operators have been reluctant to reduce their prices and with reports of profit on these calls being as much as 400 per cent, it’s not hard to see why. Up until recently, the most you could do about it was to moan at an uninterested store assistant who would direct you to the small print of your contract, but fortunately the European Union has taken pity on you and has swung its mighty hammer of regulation by capping all roaming charges within the EU.
From July 1, all outgoing calls will be capped at 52 cent per minute and incoming calls at 23 cent per minute. For all of you who suffer from textual addiction, outgoing messages will cost 13c and all incoming texts will be free. These caps are the maximum and the four mobile companies in Ireland have priced their new charges slightly under the limit with outgoing calls costing you 47 cent per minute and incoming calls at 18 cent.
These new charges only apply to EU countries and if you use your mobile elsewhere, you will be charged significantly higher rates. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about the charges, but there are a couple of things that you can do to limit how much you will be charged.
Firstly, you can divert your calls to voicemail, which depending on your provider can eliminate the cost of receiving calls. Most networks charge you for diverted calls but in most cases, this charge will be significantly lower that the roaming tariff.
Picking the cheapest network in the country you are travelling in can also make a difference; most phones will be set to automatically pick a network and can sometimes pick a network based on signal strength and compatibility rather than the network that has a roaming agreement with your provider. To avoid this you should set your phone network selection to manual and also check the website of your provider as this will list the networks that you should connect to.
The new regulations also have some provisions for data usage as well and while they don’t cap data charges, they do impose a usage limit of €60 to prevent the unwary from having to remortgage their homes after downloading a few apps. The Internet is full of horror stories concerning these charges and some of these run into hundreds of Euro. There’s one case in Britain of a student being hit with a £8,000 bill after he used the internet during a two week stay in France.
The charge limit itself is pretty straightforward and cuts a user of off when they have downloaded €60 worth of data. If the user wants to continue to download they have to contact their provider in order to get normal service resumed.
These regulations will be reviewed in a year and further cuts are expected, particularly in light of data charges.
