UK – The return of the roaming economy

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It wasn’t long ago that the major UK mobile operators said they had no plans to reintroduce roaming charges after Brexit. At the beginning of the year they declared unanimously that nothing would change in the United Kingdom despite leaving the EU. But now the first company doesn’t want to know anything more. The provider EE, which belongs to the BT Group, announced that charges for telephone calls, SMS and data usage in other European countries will be incurred for contracts concluded from July 7th. From 2022 onwards, UK customers will have to pay two pounds a day if they use their mobile phones in the EU and some other European countries.

After Brexit, the return of roaming charges is one of the most noticeable changes in everyday British life to date. So now comes back what the EU abolished in 2017. Until recently, the fact that you do not have to pay anything extra when making calls in other EU countries also applied in the UK, which still followed EU rules until the end of the Brexit transition phase. But since the beginning of the year, companies in Great Britain no longer have to adhere to it. The free trade agreement signed by London and Brussels in December 2020 simply states: “The parties shall endeavor to work together to promote transparent and reasonable tariffs for international mobile roaming services in order to promote the growth of trade between the parties and the benefit of the consumer to improve.”

The fact that the mobile communications providers EE, O2, Vodafone and Three had initially declared that they would voluntarily waive roaming charges was surprising from an economic point of view. After all, the wireless service providers made a lot of money with it for years. From a business point of view, EE’s decision to raise fees again is understandable. The decision is unlikely to benefit the “consumer welfare” mentioned in the trade agreement; although EE claims that the roaming revenues would now contribute to “investing in our UK-based customer service and our leading UK network”.

EE is alone with that. However, competitor O2 announced an upper limit for free roaming within EU countries. Anyone who needs more than 25 gigabytes of data volume per month should pay an extra fee. How the other providers Vodafone and Three react to this should soon become apparent. German customers advise consumer advocates to find out from their mobile operator to what extent roaming charges are incurred again when they travel to Great Britain.

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