Thanks to roaming charges, using your mobile phone abroad may prove to be 30 times more expensive than using it at home, writes Jamie Smyth
There is no doubt about it, mobile phones are wonderfully convenient things. Suffer a puncture on the way home from work? No problem, just call the AA from the comfort of your car. Need to contact your son or daughter in a hurry? Now it's easy to ring them on their mobile.
But as Labour TD Joe Costello found out this week, taking your mobile with you on holiday can result in a nasty surprise sitting on the doormat when you return home.
Roaming rates - the charges mobile firms levy on customers when they make or receive calls abroad - can be 20 or 30 times more expensive than mobile calls made at home. And the complexity of roaming tariff plans makes it almost impossible to judge exactly how much you spend when travelling abroad.
Costello claims he incurred a monthly bill of €740 from Vodafone even though his handset was powered off during his honeymoon to Mauritius. His phone was subsequently cut off by Vodafone when he didn't pay his bill.
Vodafone is still investigating the incident but says its subscribers are not charged if they turn off their mobiles when abroad. It also says its roaming prices are "transparent".
On the latter point I beg to differ. After several hours surfing Vodafone, O2 and Meteor's websites this week, I have to admit I'm still struggling to find the cheapest roaming tariffs for my next trip to Britain. Meteor doesn't even put its roaming rates on its website for subscribers.
As a general rule roaming tariffs for pre-pay subscribers - some 70 per cent of the three million mobile users in the Republic - are higher than for those people who sign up to a contract. Vodafone charges 99 cent a minute to make or receive a call while in Britain, if the user is roaming on its sister firm, Vodafone UK. This increases to €1.60 per minute if the user is roaming on a rival UK network. O2 pre-pay customers are charged a flat €1.20 for all calls regardless of the network used. A rip off? Almost certainly, especially when you consider local or international calls made on fixed line phones in Britain can cost less than 10 cent per minute.
But at least the tariffs for pre-pay mobile subscribers are relatively easy to follow. Getting to grips with roaming for contract users requires a degree in mathematics and oodles of patience.
With the help of O2 and Vodafone officials, the table right - which relates to standard contract users - demonstrates that staying connected to your home network's sister firm while in Britain is no guarantee of a cheap rate.
In fact, if an O2 contract customer were to roam on its sister network in Britain, they would be charged more than if they roamed on other networks for most types of calls. This principle is the same regardless of where you travel to.
To further complicate matters, the most cost-effective roaming network also changes depending on the type of call made or received, and for text messages. For example, an O2 customer should change his/her phone to roam on the Orange network to send texts for just 11 cent, but he/she should change to Vodafone's UK network to make calls back to an Irish home phone. The difference between making a call on the cheapest roaming network and the most expensive network can vary as much as 66 cent per minute, or €6.60 for 10 minutes.
To get these savings, consumers should be aware that they can manually set their mobiles to pick up the most cost-efficient roaming partner. This usually involves clicking through to the tools icon on their handset and choosing the network selection option. They should then be offered a choice of roaming partners.
But all this fidgeting hardly makes for a consumer-friendly experience, especially when you consider the high prices users pay for the privilege of roaming.
Janinne Legge, who lives in Newry but works in Dundalk, knows all about the expense of roaming. Everytime she crosses the Border, and sometimes even before she crosses the Border, her phone roams onto other networks.
Both Vodafone and O2 acknowledge that signals from British mobile companies often stray into the Republic, and vice versa. This can be extremely costly for locals who find themselves inadvertently roaming on British networks.
"I got around this problem by using two SIM cards (the chip which connects a mobile phone to a particular network), one with a Northern operator and one with a Southern operator," says Legge. Most people living around the Border area do this and use pay-as-you-go mobile SIMs. This way you pay for calls at local rates on both phones. But you do have two phone numbers, she says.
This is one of the key points of advice offered by a consumer guide, Controlling the Cost When Using Your Irish Mobile Phone Abroad, recently published by the Commission for Consumer Regulation.
This pamphlet advises consumers to consider sending texts rather than making calls and using local payphones or renting a mobile when they enter a different country. Rental mobile services are an increasingly common sight at European airports.
Gary Cooney, president of the Letterkenny Chamber of Commerce and owner of a petshop, is used to hefty mobile bills landing on his doormat. "The packages are so complex it is almost impossible to work out if you are on the right one," he says. "The whole thing is a rip-off anyway and hurts business. Nowadays in the technology age, there shouldn't be roaming . . . Why can't there be an all-Ireland tariff?"
That is a very good question. After all, weren't we promised the benefits of seamless roaming on Vodafone's European network when it bought Eircell in 2001?
Vodafone director of regulator affairs, Laurence McCauley, says the firm is currently trying to reduce the problem of signal overspill between Northern Ireland and the Republic by installing new equipment on its masts. But this will have to wait until a new technical agreement is hammered out between the British and Irish regulatory authorities, he says.
On the issue of tariffs, Vodafone blames the charges levied by operators abroad for using their network to carry roaming calls. These fees are then handed on to Vodafone's customers, thereby increasing roaming costs.
Meanwhile, Vodafone is not allowed to offer special roaming rates between its sister firms for regulatory issues. This may have kept calls higher than they could be, says McCauley.
But not everyone is convinced by these arguments, in particular the European Commission. In 2002 it raided the offices of several European firms, including O2 and Vodafone, to investigate allegations of price fixing on roaming tariffs.
Bumper profits earned by the two big Irish mobile firms - Vodafone made a pre-tax profit of €155 million in the year to March 2002 - could raise eyebrows in Europe, where many firms are losing cash.
The Commission is expected to issue a decision on the case later this year, and if found guilty, the firms could face fines and regulatory action to reduce roaming rates. But until then, consumers will have to vote with their fingers, and make sure their mobiles are switched off when abroad.