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05 November 2012 ~ 0 Comments

O2 hikes non-EU roaming charges

O2 has just announced tariff changes that will see mobile users hit by massive increases in their non-EU roaming charges. The new prices will come in on 28 November and see the cost of making and receiving calls and texts when travelling abroad rise significantly. In some cases, the price hike is greater than 130%, making calls can now cost as much as £1.50/minute and data is still charged at a gargantuan £6/MB.

When roaming in the US, the cost of making calls has increased from 90p/minute to £1.10/minute, the price of sending texts has risen by 60% from 25p each to 40p each. The biggest increase is in the price of receiving calls while using US networks on an O2 SIM – it’ll soon be 90p/minute instead of 39p minute previously.

In the Asia Pacific region including regions such as Hong Kong, Singpore and Austrialia, making calls has gone up from 60p/minute to 80p/minute, receiving calls from 43p/minute to 80p/minute and the price of texting is up 10p to 40p each.

Roaming outside the EU, North America and Asia Pacific has the most expensive prices with the cost of making calls now up to a huge £1.50/minute. Even receiving calls has increased from 85p/minute to £1.25/minute. In all countries outside the EU, O2 have kept data roaming at an exorbitant and completely unusable £6/MB. We were recently discussing iPlayer bandwidth requirements in light of the expensive EE mobile internet tariffs but these really take the biscuit – if it weren’t for mandatory caps and roaming add-ons, watching an hour-long episode on iPlayer while on holiday in Turkey would cost you a bank-breaking £3792. And that’s not even using the HD version.

Critics will be quick to point out that these roaming price increases come rather soon after the EU-mandated price caps on roaming in member states. Surely O2 aren’t subsidising these price increases with tariff hikes elsewhere? O2 have denied this but we remain rather sceptical. Still, having said that, it has to be admitted that O2‘s prices were much cheaper than other rival networks until these price increases. Even after 28 November, their roaming costs will be lower than T-Mobile’s and Vodafone’s.

So what can you do to avoid being impacted by these usurious price hikes? One thing we have always recommended is to ensure that your mobile is unlocked then you can buy a cheap PAYG SIM card when abroad and use that instead. Even calling home with a SIM on a local mobile network is usually much cheaper than using your normal SIM and making calls within the country is substantially less expensive.

The only other thing you can do is to look into moving network. For example, look at other virtual networks using O2‘s infrastructure such as Tesco and Giffgaff. With Giffgaff, text messages are much cheaper at 8p each when in the EU and 30p each anywhere else. You can save money over O2‘s “Rest of the World” roaming rates and making and receiving calls are only £1/minute compared to £1.50/minute and £1.25/minute respectively. Even data is marginally cheaper at £1/MB less than O2‘s tariff.

What do you think of O2‘s roaming price hike? Another sign that the network’s lost it? Or only fair given that the other networks still charge even more? Will you leave to join a cheaper network, use a local SIM in the future or just suck it up? Has it changed your opinion of O2? Let us know…

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30 October 2012 ~ 0 Comments

4G now live in the UK

After a long wait, 4G LTE mobile internet went live in the UK today. Initially, only Orange and T-Mobile will offer it through their specialist brand, EE. 4G promises to offer much faster speeds than the previous 3G mobile data standard with EE promising a five-fold increase in available bandwidth. They hope that Britain will now become a leader in the global mobile industry after lagging behind the US and much of Europe in bringing 4G to consumers.

The initial roll-out will be trialled in several large densely-populated cities. Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Sheffield and Southampton will get 4G coverage first. The count will rise to sixteen areas in total by the end of the year when Belfast, Derby, Hull, Nottingham and Newcastle get 4G coverage. EE expect to rapidly extend the 4G coverage throughout 2013 and by 2014 well over 90% of the UK population should be able to get it on their mobiles. You will need a 4G-enabled handset like the iPhone 5 though.

However, the launch has been hit by several problems. First of all, as our analysis has already revealed, EE’s pricing structure for 4G makes the upgrade all but pointless. Pricing starts at £36/month for a paltry 500MB monthly limit and the other tariffs are are either so restrictive or so expensive that it’s hard to see how customers will be able to benefit from the upgrade. The lack of any unlimited data plans is also woeful.

Secondly, it appears that EE have imposed an artificial cap on the 4G bandwidth. While throttled bandwidth is not unheard of, there’s no real excuse for crippling what people are paying for. Especially when 4G is capable of providing speeds several times faster than the 12 Mbps limit they are said to be using. There has been no official confirmation that they are throttling but initial tests indicate that it’s probably happening.

Have you gone for the upgrade to 4G on your phone? What sort of speeds are you seeing with EE’s 4G service? And do you think it’s worth the money?

28 October 2012 ~ 26 Comments

Can EE defend its 4G pricing?

There’s been quite a backlash following last week’s announcement of the 4G pricing on EE. Customers and commentators variously described it as a con and a rip-off. We wrote an in-depth analysis of the price scheme and what the tariffs would mean for you. But now EE have been trying to respond to the complaints and explain how it came to the prices it did.

We had various issues with the pricing of EE’s 4G tariffs. All had the same root cause – data pricing in the UK is exorbitant in general and will stay that way as long as customers let the mobile networks get away with it. The prices we have to pay as customers bear no resemblance to the actual charges incurred by mobile companies. Part of that is because none of the networks saw the importance of mobile internet quickly enough so they are all still playing catch-up. But another more important reason was something we didn’t touch upon so much in our first article: the decline of voice.

At the moment, Orange and T-Mobile (who make up EE) get most of their revenue for voice calls. By charging up to 25p/minute on PAYG and will expensive contracts, they get a huge amount of profit by charging high prices for making calls. However, with the rise of mobile internet, people use their phones to make calls less and less. Part of this is also due to applications such as Skype and the rise of VoIP. The phone companies are greedily trying to recoup their profits from other products and overpriced mobile internet is the obvious place to look.

So how are EE trying to justify this? Well to start with, they are saying because 4G makes such a difference compared to regular 3G, because it’s so much faster, it’s worth paying a premium for. We already covered this in our article though – there’s no point at all in have superfast internet if you can run through your allowance in a few minutes. Or if it costs more than a tenner to use it to watch a programme on iPlayer or 4od.

EE countered that customers aren’t using mobile data like that. They aren’t rushing through their allowances quickly or watching a lot of TV. Instead they are using their home wifi. This is completely missing the point. Customers aren’t using up their allowances in a matter of minutes because they can’t afford to. They have to be constantly vigilant and cripple their usage to ensure they have enough data left at the end of the month to check their emails. What’s the point of having fast 4G if you have to use it as if it were 3G? The same applies to not using it to watch streaming video and TV. And in any case, they are paying a separate company for their wifi connection and if they are using wifi for streaming why bother with 4G?

Another big criticism we had was the lack of unlimited tariffs. EE went on to say that most customers use only about 1 or 2 GB a month even on unlimited tariffs. But surely that’s largely because 3G is too slow to download much more than that? And many others don’t use much data to keep within their limits and avoid huge overage charges. EE are constantly drilling home the point that 4G is so much faster than 3G. But it’s so fast you can’t use it or you’ll use up your allowance. The point of 4G is it’s meant to open up all these opportunities to use mobile internet in a new way but with strict low data limits, this can’t happen.

Any, underlying all this, 1GB of data is 1GB of data whether you get it at 4G speeds or 3G speeds. The simple facts are you have to pay more for the same amount of data with EE. And compared to packages on Orange and T-Mobile, you have no option to go for an unmetered all-inclusive package to save having to constantly worry about how much data you’re using. There’s really no excuse for not offering unlimited internet tariffs as an option.

So while we have some sympathy for EE trying to make the most of their 4G monopoly and squeeze every last penny out, we still think they are conning customers and doing mobile data provision in the UK a disservice as a whole. From reading around it seems that nobody’s buying EE’s excuses right now. A braver forward thinking company would do things completely differently. What a shame.