EU plan swaps roaming fees for roaming fudge
The European Commission has reworked its plan to end mobile phone roaming fees in the face of widespread criticism of its 90-day annual limit.
It now plans to abolish all hard limits on roaming, but fudged the details by allowing carriers to block or charge for usage they consider abusive in order to prevent, say, Irish consumers bankrupting Latvian mobile operators.
Under the new proposal, mobile subscribers will be able to roam across the European Union year-round with no charge -- unless their carrier thinks their usage abusive. In that case, after alerting the subscriber the carrier will be able to levy roaming surcharges of €0.04 (4 cents) per minute, €0.01 per text message or about €8.70 per gigabyte of data.
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