Farewell to roaming charges

AN agreement in June to scrap roaming charges for mobile phone users has been voted into law by the European Parliament.

It will eventually mean that travellers within the EU will pay the same prices for calls, texts and data downloads as they do at home.
The change, originally promised for the end of this year, follows two years of negotiations and U-turns as governments attempted to protect their own national telecoms groups. The EC is claiming that the amendment will end ‘huge telephone bills ruining your holiday budget’.
At present, customers who visit any one of the 28 EU states can be charged up to 19 cents for outgoing calls, five cents for incoming calls, six cents for every text message and 20 cents per megabyte of data downloaded.