Mobile Phone Roaming Charges To Be Banned In The EU From 2017

Can we get a 'hell yeah!' This is the best mobile phone news we’ve heard in a while. There’s nothing worse than heading off on holidays and coming home to an enormous bill thanks to roaming charges from using your mobile. The charges are usually added by mobile operators when users are travelling abroad and generally include increased tariffs on calls, text and internet usage. Sound. Thankfully, that’s all about to become a thing of the past as the EU has voted that extra costs for using your phone in countries around the EU will be banned from the middle of 2017. The ban will come into effect on June 15^th, 2017 and was given the all clear by the European Parliament this week. In the meantime, a cap on charges will be introduced from April 30^th, 2016 which means you will be charged no more than €0.05 extra per minute for calls, €0.02 extra for text messages and €0.05 extra per megabyte of data. It has been reported that this cap will make roaming about 75 per cent cheaper than it is now, before the charges are obliterated altogether in 2017. Overall, the ban aims to stop customers getting hit with enormous phone bills when they return home from holidays in other European countries and so, from June 15^th 2017, you will be charged the same as you would be in your home country. Winning. We think it’s time to get booking some flights… but remember, this ban only applies to EU countries. If that's not what you call good news, we don't know what is.