{"id":4405,"date":"2017-04-11T08:20:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T15:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=4405"},"modified":"2017-04-11T08:24:02","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T15:24:02","slug":"europe-bans-domestic-roaming-charges-heres-big-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/europe-bans-domestic-roaming-charges-heres-big-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe bans domestic roaming charges: Here’s why it’s a big deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The European politicians have had enough of telco abuse, and are outlawing roaming charges within Europe. Normally, you would not care much about more market regulation and just shrug it off as politicians doing some favor for some industry \u2013 but in this case, the politicians themselves have had enough, personally. This is a big deal for 500 million European people who will no longer be charged an arm and a leg for mobile voicecalls, texts, or data just for going next state.<\/p>\n

The European Parliament has voted to ban intra-EU roaming charges altogether<\/a>, taking effect on June 15. This includes all out-of-state surcharges for voice, text, and data.<\/p>\n

The European Union was founded on the idea of Freedom of Movement: the so-called Four Freedoms<\/em> are the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital. In effect, this means that as a citizen of one of the EU states, I can live and work wherever I want in Europe \u2013 just like the US works.<\/p>\n

In Europe, just like in the US, you have continent-wide telecoms operators. Just like you have Verizon and Sprint in the US, you\u2019d have Vodafone, 3, and T-Mobile in Europe. One-state carriers practically don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

And despite this, the telcos have hit you with insane roaming charges the instant you step over a state line, even while staying within the EU and (usually) on the same company\u2019s network.<\/p>\n

In other words, where politicians and people have decided that Europe should behave like and feel like a single country with people going where they please, a few telco operators have been remarkably successful in preventing this in practice for half a billion people. You have not had freedom of movement without it hitting your wallet hard, and therefore not in practice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

These roaming charges are \u2013 have been \u2013 horrendous. When traveling outside your home state, say to Gen\u00e8ve or Z\u00fcrich (in Switzerland), the telcos charge $15 per megabyte of data. That\u2019s per mega-<\/em> byte. Like, do they still even manufacture<\/em> those small units? <\/p>\n

(As a side note, the telco industry is so oligopolized it\u2019s used to charging insane prices that has little to do with cost \u2013 for example, they\u2019re charging more, byte for byte, for a text message sent next door than NASA\u2019s cost for sending the same data from Mars<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another aspect Americans don\u2019t typically think of: Europe is very small, area-wise. It\u2019s compact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Continental EU (excluding the sparse tundras of Sweden and Finland) has an area of about 3,700,000 km\u00b2. Let\u2019s compare this to a single state in the United States \u2013 Texas \u2013 with an area of about 700,000 km\u00b2: The continental EU is roughly the size of five US states, but divided into twenty-four states.<\/p>\n

In other words, you can barely leave your home town<\/em> without crossing a state line. Just here in Amsterdam (Netherlands), where I\u2019m writing this morning, there are signs at the central station for local trains to Berlin (Germany) and to Brussels (Belgium) \u2013 and that\u2019s just the signs in my field of view right now.<\/p>\n

And by leaving your home town, you\u2019ve effectively made your phone useless because you can\u2019t use it in practice \u2013 thereby effectively cutting you off from the outside world. <\/p>\n

If I\u2019m going to pinpoint a reason this happened to the happiness of European people and completely against the telecom lobby (and in favor of no other, equally powerful lobby), then it was that European politicians were personally<\/em> hit by this shady practice every time they went to work in Brussels. Wherever their home state was, they got hit by heavy surcharges that shouldn\u2019t be there, each and every day. If you want policy to change against your industry, make sure you make politicians personally annoyed about your service, every month. Preferably all of them.<\/p>\n

Telcos haven\u2019t missed a beat in presenting this as their own offering of lowered prices, of course. \u201cWe\u2019ve lowered the price of roaming by as much as 70%!\u201d Yes, they have, because they were forced<\/em> to, and they don\u2019t go a cent<\/em> cheaper than they were forced to \u2013 all while trying to present it as customer friendliness.<\/p>\n

In the long run, telcos won\u2019t be the ones providing the internet at all \u2013 because it kills their existing cash cows,<\/a> and so, upstarts will leapfrog them at some point. But at least, they\u2019re not preventing freedom of movement in Europe any more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The European politicians have had enough of telco abuse, and are outlawing roaming charges within Europe. Normally, you would not care much about more market regulation and just shrug it off as politicians doing some favor for some industry \u2013 but in this case, the politicians themselves have had enough, personally. This is a big … Continue reading “Europe bans domestic roaming charges: Here’s why it’s a big deal”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":true,"_modified_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-governments"],"yoast_head":"\nEurope bans domestic roaming charges: here's why it is a big deal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Europeans have been hit with insane surcharges the instant they go next state, effectively nullifying freedom of movement within Europe. 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