Vodafone scraps roaming charges

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 14 May 2009 at 10:23

Vodafone is to scrap roaming charges for three months beginning June.

The offer means that Vodafone customers will be able to make calls from anywhere within the European Union for the same rate they pay in the UK. It also means they won't be charged to receive incoming calls, one of the other major bugbears associated with roaming.

The offer also applies to text and picture messages, though data will still be charged at a standard roaming rate.

The offer is open to all Vodafone contract and pay-as-you-go customers who sign up for the company's free Passport scheme. The Passport scheme has been around for some time, but previously charged customers a 64p connection charge before the cost of the roaming call dropped to a standard rate.

That charge is now gone, and the list of countries covered has been bumped by ten to 45 - though the US isn't covered.

Vodafone is calling the offer "an experiment" and says it may consider extending the deal beyond the initial three months depending on how successful it is.

The offer pre-empts new EU legislation which will impose a strict ceiling on the amount that mobile operators across Europe charge one another for access to their networks.

Contract customers looking to sign up need to text the word 'Passport' to 97888, while pay-as-you-go customers do the same to 2345.