UK mobile users face return of steep roaming bills after Brexit
Negotiating a trade deal to cover roaming will be delicate task, warns industry
British mobile phone users face bills of up to €50 for each song they stream while roaming in the EU, unless the UK can agree a comprehensive free-trade deal after Brexit.
The EU has campaigned against roaming fees over the past decade, reducing what operators can charge ahead of an eventual abolition for nearly all users from next summer. The reforms were repeatedly hailed by former prime minister David Cameron during the Brexit referendum.
But Britain will not be covered by these rules once it quits the bloc, allowing continental carriers to charge British consumers what they like — and potentially leaving consumers with the bills of €10 per MB that are commonly paid by US and Swiss visitors who do not arrange special data packages.
“That is the risk,” said one EU official working on roaming charges.
The return of “bill shock” — the surprisingly large charge from your phone company after a trip abroad — will be more pronounced now that people use their phones for more than just talking and texting.
For example, listening to a song on Spotify takes between 3MB and 5MB, which would leave non-EU customers with a bill of up to €50.
UK networks fear that rival telecoms companies in the EU could raise wholesale prices for calls and data. One telecoms executive told the Financial Times that it is preparing for a “worse case scenario”, in which these higher charges were not covered entirely by roaming charges, but would spill over into higher line rental or other fees across the whole network. “We could be exposed to the likes of France and Spain raising prices,” he said.
A quick bilateral deal between the UK and the EU to cover roaming is not possible, according to the European Commission. In a response to a question on the topic last year, Günther Oettinger, the German commissioner responsible for the bloc’s telecoms policy, said that “there are obvious constraints”.
Under WTO rules, any bilateral agreement outside of a comprehensive free-trade deal would have to be extended to all other WTO members, warned Mr Oettinger in a response to the European Parliament last year.
Negotiating roaming rights as part of any free-trade deal will be delicate, warned industry experts and officials.
Countries that receive huge numbers of British tourists may be unwilling to offer generous terms to the UK, largely because tourist traffic — and subsequent congestion on networks — is tilted in one direction.
While 13m British people visited Spain last year, far fewer Spanish travelled the other way. It took a decade of negotiations to persuade countries such as Italy and Spain to sign off on the EU’s current limits on roaming fees, warned officials.
Instead, operators would have to forge their own bilateral deals with other phone companies across Europe. During these talks companies that operate their own networks in the UK, such as Vodafone and Three, would be able to exchange access to their own infrastructure with continental peers. This would potentially make negotiations straightforward, according to officials.
Smaller “virtual operators”, who do not own infrastructure and piggyback on the networks of larger rivals, such as TalkTalk and Sky, have no such leverage and would be unlikely to be offered generous terms, leaving their customers facing potentially huge price hikes, warned one official.
Talks between operators have been relatively straightforward in recent years as the EU has capped what they can charge each other, leaving little incentive to drive a hard bargain.