Every time we enter a new country our little phone greets us with a beep beep, beep beep. Only to be quickly disappointed to find a text message from our network provider telling us about the extortionate prices they are going to charge us. However, when we entered Norway a few days ago, we got a nice surprise from Virgin Mobile!

“Welcome to Norway! Calls to UK and other EU countries cost £0.03 per minute including a £0.04 per minute surcharge and it is £0.01 to send a text to UK or EU mobile including a 1p surcharge. There is no charge to receive calls or texts. MMS cost £0.30 each. To use data you will need a data pass from £0.35 for 10mb.”

We only use Virgin for our phone and not for data (we use a SIM only from 3 for data) so its the price of phone calls and text messages that impacts us in a positive way. From 30 April 2016, EU regulations demand networks to lower their roaming charges and from June 2017, all EU roaming charges across the networks will be scrapped altogether.

So it’s with a great sigh of relief to report we can say cheerio to shockingly high roaming charges when travelling through Europe.

EU Roaming Charges June 2017

Even better news is that from June 2017, all EU roaming charges across the networks will be scrapped altogether. From April 30th operators will only be able to charge a small additional amount to domestic prices up to €0.05 per minute of call made, €0.02 per SMS sent, and €0.05 per MB of data (excl. VAT). Incredibly, the EU has achieved retail price reductions across calls, SMS and data of over 80% since 2007 and data roaming is now up to 91% cheaper compared to 2007.

Have the mobile operators lost out? We think not as since 2007 the volume of the data roaming market has grown by 630%. Feels like a win win for everyone.