Are you sure, in which countries can you get unlimited mobile data?
[doublepost=1481271538][/doublepost]See Phil, that is courage!!!
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European Union Moves Forward With Plans to Eliminate Roaming Charges Next Year
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[doublepost=1481271538][/doublepost]See Phil, that is courage!!!
It's the other way around. Not unlimited plans. but our plans do have alot of data, here in Denmark every plan has atleast ~10 GB data and unlimited sms/mms.
My current plan is 20 GB data, unlimited sms/mms and 15 hours of talk for ~16$.
I'm looking forward to this. I hate being "forced" to not roam and use data when I'm traveling because I don't want a nasty phone bill.
You might be mistaken. Most countries in Europe I have seen prieces from offer unlimited texts and charge for an amout of data.
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And we in the remaining EU will have to pay extra when travelling to the UK, when it is out of the EU and not following the EU-roaming price rules. Apparently the operators in the UK are among those in EU that are net receivers of roaming charges (together with mostly countries in the south of Europe), so they might be happy after Brexit when they can apply high charges to all visitors. If, of course, as many people will be travelling to the UK as before. We can only hope there'll be an agreement between UK and EU like the ones with US, Swiss or Iceland, for which the prices are lower.
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So just out of curiosity, if you're one of the people who do believe in the idea of a Europe that values trade, cooperation, and friendship between the European countries - what is your basis for believing that the EU that exists in reality is so vastly different from the one that you think it should be? Why do you think it is too bureaucratic, why do you call it an "EUSSR"?
If you look at the figures, the group at the European Commission that works on Telecommunications & Technology (CNECT) employs a total of 754 people. That group deals with everything from digital privacy discussions over development of 4G / 5G networks, stimulating European innovation on robotics and AI, ... 754 is not a massive amount of people to work on topics like that.
Probably around 100 of those were involved in this global roaming topic, which seems reasonable given the size of the legislation. Yes, it took a number of years to get to this point, but note that this is not the first result to come out of these initiatives - earlier EU regulations already significantly lowered costs for regular calls, text messages, and data usage, this is just the latest wave of the telecoms package.
You have to keep in mind that the EU is walking a balancing act between what can be decided at a federal level and what is up to the sovereign member states to decide, so a lot of time is spent going back and forth between the federal level and the individual countries. Efforts to streamline the process by allowing more decisions to be made at a federal level are not very popular at the moment (this are exactly the "path that it's on" that you believe will tear Europe apart), and national politicians are happily exploiting the perceived inefficiency of the EU to keep more power at the national level (thus making the process even more inefficient). It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
So again, my honest question is - what is your basis for thinking the EU is an overcomplicated bureaucracy and needs to be scaled back? As far as i'm concerned it's doing a pretty good job and needs to be scaled up.
Unlimited is not dead yet, at least in Finland all the major carriers offer unlimited plans now. Prices vary from 30€ to 40€ for unlimited talk/text/4G. A couple of years back most had data caps, as they might still have on the lower price range.
It's freakin' awesome
The carriers can still set whatever prices they want at home, they just can't make those prices extortionate abroad. And they really used to be. There are already EU regulations in place. A few years back, checking your email while roaming would quickly end up 100-200 dollar bills over a few days - the prices were ludicrous! Now with the current regulations in place it's not much, if at all, more expensive. I'm actually surprised they're doing this additional step, as it's already *so good*.Somebody asked whether the UK could keep this after leaving the EU. I'm from Norway and Norway's currently getting the roaming benefits of the current EU regulations, but that means paying into the EEA: Perhaps oversimplifying: you're paying the same, get some of the benefits, but don't have a vote.
EDIT: In all seriousness - is meddling in private business like this really a good idea?
a healthy society is based on balances. Without the aggregated power of the people business will extract more then their fair share. By organising competition (yes this was invoked deliberatly some 20 years ago by pressure of the EU on national governments), creating level playing fields and cutting away opportunities for companies to collide services will be improved and cost to society as a whole reduced. The moment one of the parties/industries involved is extracting more then necessary (including a healthy profit as a reward, an incentive and way to invoke innovation/new business) it will be counter productive to society as a whole for resources are not used optimally and citizens have less spending power as a result which is negative for other companies then the industry imposing these "monopolistic tariffs".
As a EU-citizen, and having worked in the mobile industry, I have seen the benefits of both national and EU laws to help telecom firms move forward, deliver better services for better prices while remaining a healthy industry able to invest in new technology. Roaming profits are just arbitrary profits which can be fully offloaded to customers by the telecoms. Customers can not escape from them unless regulations help them. Roaming charges can be seen as an (implicit) industry wide cartel.
I am pretty pleased that I can have free voice/text and 6,5 gb data per month for 4G services at €20 in the Netherlands today and as of next year in EU . If we had to wait for "free markets" to do their work and come to teh same point we could have waited for ages...
a healthy society is based on balances. Without the aggregated power of the people business will extract more then their fair share. By organising competition (yes this was invoked deliberatly some 20 years ago by pressure of the EU on national governments), creating level playing fields and cutting away opportunities for companies to collide services will be improved and cost to society as a whole reduced. The moment one of the parties/industries involved is extracting more then necessary (including a healthy profit as a reward, an incentive and way to invoke innovation/new business) it will be counter productive to society as a whole for resources are not used optimally and citizens have less spending power as a result which is negative for other companies then the industry imposing these "monopolistic tariffs".
As a EU-citizen, and having worked in the mobile industry, I have seen the benefits of both national and EU laws to help telecom firms move forward, deliver better services for better prices while remaining a healthy industry able to invest in new technology. Roaming profits are just arbitrary profits which can be fully offloaded to customers by the telecoms. Customers can not escape from them unless regulations help them. Roaming charges can be seen as an (implicit) industry wide cartel.
I am pretty pleased that I can have free voice/text and 6,5 gb data per month for 4G services at €20 in the Netherlands today and as of next year in EU . If we had to wait for "free markets" to do their work and come to teh same point we could have waited for ages...
When you say over-regulated I hope you're not thinking of that example about regulations on "pillows", where the majority where actually about pillow joints
There's so much misinformation about this stuff.Erm... actually no, that would be pretty terrible I think
.Coupling the phone hardware to a single network (i.e. single set of physical towers out there providing coverage) would be really bad, as a company like Apple wouldn't have any incentive to install cell phone towers in e.g. Nigeria, but no local players would be able to step into that hole in the market because they wouldn't have the resources to develop cellphone hardware as well. In some markets, vertical integration can be a good thing (e.g. I don't mind the fact that Apple software runs only on Apple hardware), but in the case of cellphones and networks I'd say they're best kept seperate.
I do agree however that it would be nice to no longer have to use a physical SIM, but see it fully replaced by some type of digital sign-in to a network. My understanding is Apple & co have been working on that one for years, but there's so much legacy technology involved that it's not such an easy thing to replace.
I don't know if three has improved their coverage but I tried them two years ago and their coverage was a disaster. The coverage was bad even at my home and that is in London. My experience of multiply carriers in the UK is that EE is by far the best UK carrier for coverage. I just changed from EE to BT only because it is exactly the same network and I got more data for my money.
There's pretty clear economical / game theoretical criteria to determine whether intervening in a market is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing. The European Commission tends to evaluate those criteria quite thoughtfully on a case-by-case basis, and they usually publish their motivation for intervening in certain markets and not in others. I've read a few of their motivations, and I can assure you these are not rash judgments.
I've found in discussions with American colleagues that they tend to be very strictly adhere to the concept of free market capitalism (Adam Smith). But there are circumstances in which the free market provably leads to suboptimal result (as proven by John Nash, of A Beautiful Mind fame). On top of that, Americans tend to have a deep-rooted distrust of (especially federal) government, stereotyping it as being incompetent and tyrannical. I guess that's partially an inheritance of the struggle for independence. Many Europeans tend to think of government more as part of the social contract we have with each other, and in some cases the best way to get things done.
In this specific example, the telecoms industry tends to be pretty consolidated (due to the large investment required to build out the physical assets, i.e. the cell phone towers). Most countries have 3-5 major operators. Very few consumers pick their subscription based on roaming charges, so the incentive for telecoms operators is to keep them high, even though cost to provide the service is actually relatively low. There is a negative outside effect on other markets, since consumers not using their data while abroad negatively impacts other industries in ways that do not factor into the dynamics of the telecom market itself. All of these make for a good case for government intervention in this one.
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I actually agree with you in that the EU is a balancing act between state and federal which is one of the reasons it will never work. It needs to become federalised to really function properly, but that's not possible in my opinion due to the member states being so vastly different, it's not like the USA.
I didn't know how many people worked in the telecommunications side of the EU until now. But even still, of Three - a private company - can rollout free roaming quicker than the EU can manage then it just shows how slow and cumbersome the EU is and why it can be achieved without it.
Two reasons why I think the EU is on a downwards trajectory. Immigration and economics. You might not agree with me but I believe Merkel's insane blunder of inviting millions of people from a vastly different culture, economies and religion to flood into Europe is devastating and will only get worse (isn't Erdrogen poised to unleash another wave?). We are moving into an era of heavy automation, so how do we expect to put millions of poorly educated people to work when we already have 25% youth unemployment in Spain for example? It is left wing PC dogma that is crippling the EU. Many countries are already abolishing Shengen due to the migrant crises.
Second relates to economics and the insane Eurozone idea. Without a single federalised system overseeing it, it was always going to lead to failure. Now with Deustche Bank on the brink of collapse and the €300bn insolvency of Italian banks we could be on the brink of another major recession.
The EU doesn't want to reform and change, it wants to continue on this failed path. The UK tried to reform it, we asked for some very reasonable terms and we were just told no. The free movement of people is a mistake. It should be the free movement of skilled workers. I've witnessed first hand the impact of mass immigration from Eastern Europe on low paid depot workers. I don't blame the people moving for a better life, I blame the politicians for not having any control over it. Net 300k a year to the UK is insane and completely unsustainable. I have no issue with people with the right skills coming if there is a need for them here.
Couple insane things from the EU. Lisbon treaty in Ireland, german tax payers bailing out Greece - like throwing money on a fire.
You learned wrong. The EU is made up of 28 states, the US (United States, hint hint) is made up of 50 states. Each of the states, in both cases, are sovereign nations. It is exactly the same thing. The US is one country, but not one state. A state is a sovereign entity.
The US government "meddles" in business quite a bit. Do you think US companies are unregulated?
But you obviously don't have Comcast, or some other monopoly provider. Having a monopoly on a person's phone service is just as bad and leads to the exact same abuses.
The real question is: what makes you think business, or the market, is always right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
I've had the pleasure of using Feel at Home in 5 or 6 countries now, did you find that it was adequate, but nothing special?
All the data is captured and routed back to three, your endpoint is an IP address in the UK, no matter which country you're roaming in. It's slow, the latency is horrific and they bandwidth limit certain applications until you just feel like giving up and buy a local SIM.
Don't get me wrong, it's great for basic web searches and mapping, but try to do anything else and you just get frustrated! I know they're doing us a real favour, but they don't have to make the experience that bad, I expect to be able to stream on Spotify or watch online video if I choose to do so!
I usually don't comment here but this is so wrong and full of false facts that I have to.
Seriously? Have you ever been to the US? I feel much more on the same level with my friends all over Europe than most of my east coast American friends do with people from for example Utah. This is obviously only subjective. But the EU has gotten stuff done they still didn't get in the US (for example EU-standardized IDs and drivers license).
I am quite sure that this company employes more people than the EU on this roaming - your standards suggest that the EU is better since it's more efficient? Also, great for you to have that. In most other European countries we don't have that and are happy that the EU is doing this.
1. Millions is a bit of an overstatement but I get your point. By not wanting to have a say in the future of the EU it's not going to be better though. It's like saying I am for abolishing xxx that's why I don't vote for any party - doesn't make sense much, eh?
2. No one is abolishing Schengen (ch!).
3. And how is leaving the EU helping getting the youth jobs? Is your argument that it will be harder for British people to get education and thus automation will advance slower? If so it might also help to forbid schools. Probably you'll have less automation than anywhere else in the world in 10 years if no one can get education anymore. Or maybe, just maybe it's good to have the EU support young people to study abroad, learn a lot, fund research scholarships to give young people the possibility to success in life?
2. Many countries choose not to open up for Eastern European EU members right away. The British gov who strongly supported them joining the EU did not as they wanted the labor and knew it would benefit the country (which it does by the way - higher tax income from immigrants vs tax money spent on them)
I agree with you that it's not perfect. But just because something is not perfect and only good I don't see why you would like to throw it away rather than improve it. Well but you'll see how much more freedom your german friends will have in the future than you to get education everywhere they want - and thus will have it so much easier to find jobs.
And on topic: great. Finally!!! Should have been faster but I'm so happy they finally pushed their way through
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You'd also have a lot of catching up on European standards...
Seriously? Have you ever been to the US? I feel much more on the same level with my friends all over Europe than most of my east coast American friends do with people from for example Utah. This is obviously only subjective. But the EU has gotten stuff done they still didn't get in the US (for example EU-standardized IDs and drivers license).
I am quite sure that this company employes more people than the EU on this roaming - your standards suggest that the EU is better since it's more efficient? Also, great for you to have that. In most other European countries we don't have that and are happy that the EU is doing this.
1. Millions is a bit of an overstatement but I get your point. By not wanting to have a say in the future of the EU it's not going to be better though. It's like saying I am for abolishing xxx that's why I don't vote for any party - doesn't make sense much, eh?
2. No one is abolishing Schengen (ch!).
3. And how is leaving the EU helping getting the youth jobs? Is your argument that it will be harder for British people to get education and thus automation will advance slower? If so it might also help to forbid schools. Probably you'll have less automation than anywhere else in the world in 10 years if no one can get education anymore. Or maybe, just maybe it's good to have the EU support young people to study abroad, learn a lot, fund research scholarships to give young people the possibility to success in life?
Once again, how does it help to not have the EU? Because it will be harder to go against such enormous banks and put rules on them?
1. The U.K. was always the one to block legislations that would have put chains on banks (e.g. Financial transaction tax). We would have a much fairer EU by now and not one for the big banks if it wasn't for you bloody brits
2. Many countries choose not to open up for Eastern European EU members right away. The British gov who strongly supported them joining the EU did not as they wanted the labor and knew it would benefit the country (which it does by the way - higher tax income from immigrants vs tax money spent on them)
I agree with you that it's not perfect. But just because something is not perfect and only good I don't see why you would like to throw it away rather than improve it. Well but you'll see how much more freedom your german friends will have in the future than you to get education everywhere they want - and thus will have it so much easier to find jobs.
And on topic: great. Finally!!! Should have been faster but I'm so happy they finally pushed their way through
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You'd also have a lot of catching up on European standards...
Maybe longer. It cant take two years to get divorced. And even after that there may be some kind of agreement on the telecom industry between the UK en the EU.
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Now it's up to Theres May's cabinet. How they gonna work with EU. If like Norway, it'll work.
Well hopefully. Knowing how companies work though they will enjoy the ability to take much money for roaming from their customers. The Norway model would certainly a good thing. I don't think it's politically achievable in the U.K. though. On top of that, Norway doesn't seem too eager to give up their "superpower" status in the economic trading union.
EU cell service providers have towers in every country so they don't have to pay other companies to piggyback off their network for roaming?
Or does this mean companies can no longer charge each other (which was passed on to the customer) for sharing coverage?
Or does this mean companies can no longer charge each other (which was passed on to the customer) for sharing coverage?
Effectively they are not charging each other much already. It's more like I give you 1 TB of data in my Swedish network for 1 TB in your French network for my customers without charge. Only they still charge customers