The cost of using your mobile phone while you’re abroad is set to fall as phone operators respond to increasing pressure from the European Commission to reduce roaming charges.
“Roaming” allows mobile phone users to use their phones abroad by piggybacking on a foreign phone operator’s network but charges are currently very expensive. Some networks charge more than £1.50 a minute for making an overseas call and even as much as £1 a minute for receiving calls when abroad.
O2 has said it will cut the prices of international calls from the end of this year. Orange and T-Mobile have already cut bills for their travelling customers by 25 per cent. Vodafone customers will have to wait until next year to benefit from changes.
The latest report on roaming charges from Ofcom, published yesterday, found that a call back to the UK from France on a monthly contract with O2 would cost 85p a minute. The same call on a standard monthly contract with Orange would cost 70p and T-Mobile charges 55p for the same call. It also showed that a one-minute call from Norway to the UK could cost as much as £3.99 with some of O2’s tariffs.
You can cut your bill immediately by taking advantage of special offers from your existing network or by buying an international Sim card.
Vodafone customers can ask Vodafone to put them on its Passport service. This costs nothing to join and charges 75p per call for connecting users to their home network, whether making or receiving calls, after which you are charged the same tariff as in the UK.
Orange offers bundles of 50 minutes of incoming and outgoing calls anywhere in the EU for £25 which works out at a flat 50p a minute although any minutes not used within 30 days are lost.
Another way to reduce bills is to check on arrival that your phone chooses the cheapest local provider. Your phone company’s website will tell you which network is best and you can then manually select through the “settings” function on your handset. Texting is also the most cost-effective way of communicating using your phone as there is no charge to receive texts while you are abroad. But sending texts while abroad can cost significantly more than in the UK.
Anthony Ball, managing director of price comparison site One Compare, says one of the cheapest ways of using your phone abroad is to buy a different Sim card before you travel – either a card specifically for the country to which you are headed or a worldwide card. With a new Sim, you’ll pay between 20p and 40p a minute to phone home – and less to receive a call.
Inserting a new Sim card – available from websites such as www.sim4travel.com, www.0044.co.uk and www.gosim.com – will mean that your phone number changes. So before you leave home, record a new answer phone message on your usual Sim, so that friends and family can stay in touch.
Phone company www.oneroam.co.uk has a roaming sim card for £12.99 that will work in 150 countries and costs just 27p a minute for calls in more than 50 countries. The service allows you to receive calls abroad for free.
For a quick check of how much calls are likely to cost the GSM Association has a roaming pricing website at www.roaming.gsmeurope.org.
