There always seems to be a debate going on about roaming charges being too high. Roaming call charges were lowered by all the UK networks in August 2007, and now EU commissioner Viviane Reading is calling for the networks to lower their data roaming charges. With the rising popularity of internet enabled mobile phones and dongles, more and more people are being stung by high data charges.
You may have recently read about the story of a young boy who ran up a ?9737.12 bill from T-Mobile as he was downloading computer game upgrades whilst on holiday in Austria.
There are arguments for both sides, the consumers argument would be that T-Mobile should not allow you to run up such a high mobile phone bill, and that there data roaming charges are far too high at ?7.50 per mb. T-Mobile would argue that the customer signed up to there contract and should have read their terms and conditions outlining there charges. In this case T-Mobile revoked the customers charges but not all customers are so lucky.
T-Mobile will be lowering their data roaming cost this summer from ?7.50 per mb to ?1.50 per mb. Hopefully the other networks will follow suit and also lower their data roaming charges, other networks currently charge between ?3 (Three) and ?7.05 (O2). Direct EU regulatory intervention could force networks to lower data roaming charges if they don't take action themselves very soon.
