[ptaipale]

However, now EU regulates the price to consumers to be lower than the wholesale price of roaming charges between operators. That is a failure. They should regulate the wholesale price.

In practice: I pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data. If I go to Italy and use my subscription there, I still pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data, but my operator has to pay 7 € per gigabyte to the Italian roaming partner.

Because there are more people traveling from north EU to south EU than vice versa, and competition of mobile operators works much better in northern EU, this is practically a monetary transfer to support the economies of southern Europe. And then there's the possibility that an Italian person acquires a SIM from my operator, because local Italian ones don't sell subscriptions with unlimited mobile data...

My operator has to counter this by a price hike and/or disabling of roaming.

[dx034]

Where do you have the €7/GB from? It's the cap, not the price usually paid. I remember a study by the EC where they found out that most operators don't pay significant amount of roaming costs. It either evens out or the amounts are too small.

Most countries will have 3-4 operators so that there is competition and I doubt that €7/GB is the cheapest an Italian operator can offer to a wholesale client.

[samastur]

It doesn't work like this. Your EU guaranteed roaming mobile data package is limited to 2*monthly bill/wholesale-price-per-GB. So in your case that looks like 40/7.7 which is about 5GB. Anything beyond that your telco CAN charge you (but doesn't have to) by usage. I am not sure what that charge can be, but it is per KB spent and is calculate from wholesale price per GB.

[JoeCamel]

You should check if your unlimited plan applies to roaming. I have a unlimited data plan in Croatia, but in roaming it's limited to 10 GB.

[ptaipale]

EU was planning to explicitly regulate against such caps. If you provide unlimited data in your local operator's network, having caps when roaming would be in breach of this regulation.

Has that changed?

[tonfa]

Yes, the rule is based on how much you pay for your unlimited plan compared to wholesale regulated rates.

(tho they plan to lower the regulated rates over time)

[kalleboo]

The unregulated gouging of northern European holidaymakers before this roaming regulation was probably a far bigger monetary transfer than the regulated costs.