When in Rome... roam!

Fwd Tech  Wednesday 01 July 2009

It's now cheaper than ever to text and make calls from EU countries thanks to new legislation

Good news for people who can’t resist texting when they’re abroad in the EU: today new legislation is enforced, meaning the cost of sending text messages from your mobile while you’re eating a croissant in a Paris cafe or having a pizza in a Roman piazza has come down!

This is the first time that a text cap has been put in place, all of which means the maximum it’ll cost you to send a text from Europe is 11 Euro cents or 9.4p (plus sales tax).

Some networks have already been cutting their roaming charges for Europe in anticipation of this legislation, but now all the networks must adhere to it. So what does that mean in terms of call-making? Well, the price of making a call has been capped at 43 cents a minute, while it’ll cost you 19 cents a minute to receive a call. If you want to use the internet on your phone then to use 1MB of data the price is limited to one Euro.

What’s more mobile operators have been told that they must charge for calls by the second after the first half minute, instead of rounding up to the nearest minute. All of which means it’ll ow be cheaper to ring up your mates from a sandy beach on a remote Greek island while they’re still at work. Assuming you can get reception of course…