EXPATS in Spain visiting family at home or European tourists on holiday in the country will get less of a shock when they receive their mobile phone bills upon return – the European Commission has just slashed 'roaming' prices by over a half.
The third price reduction brought in by the Commission since 2012, it will bring down the cost of using internet on a mobile in other member States from 45 to 20 cents per megabyte.
Making calls have gone down by over a fifth, from 24 cents a minute to 19, and receiving them has come down in price by 28.5 per cent, from seven cents to five.
Sending text messages now costs six cents rather than eight, a cut of 25 per cent.
The new prices will come into effect tomorrow (Tuesday, July 1).
Additionally, European mobile network providers will be able to offer a specific 'roaming' plan to their customers before they travel, which may sometimes include using a local network in their destination country for services such as sending emails, reading the news online, uploading photographs and watching videos.
European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda department, Neelie Kroes, said the discounted costs were 'great news' but that the move was 'not enough'.
She has been calling for 'roaming' to be eliminated altogether and this is likely to happen by the end of the year.
The European Union started taking steps to cut the cost of using a mobile abroad in 2007, and since then the prices have fallen by between 80 and 90 per cent.
According to a Eurobarometer survey published in February, nearly half – 47 per cent – of EU citizens never use their mobile phones for surfing the internet in other member States, and keep calls and texts to an absolute minimum, whilst 94 per cent of those who do connect use their phones purely for installed applications such as Facebook or their email boxes.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com