My operator pursues a fair use policy for roaming services. What does that entail?
Operators are entitled to pursue a fair use policy for the use of roaming services within the European Union (and associated countries: Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).
There are two ways to implement this:
- Over a period of 4 months the operator can monitor your presence and consumption abroad:
- If your presence and roaming consumption over 4 months exceeds 50%, your operator has to notify you and ask you to change your behaviour;
- Once you have been notified by your operator, you have 2 weeks to change your behaviour;
- If your presence and consumption have not changed by the end of those 2 weeks, your operator may apply a surcharge for the roaming services.
- The operator can restrict the mobile Internet roaming consumption (your data). If you roam and exceed the mobile Internet limit your operator set, he can apply a surcharge for mobile Internet use via roaming.
Upon exceeding the fair use policy (in any which form), the surcharges applied by the operator, may not exceed the following amounts:
What do you do? | How much do you pay? (VAT included) |
---|---|
You make a call | Maximum 3.8 eurocent per call minute in addition to the domestic tariff (1.9 eurocent as of 2025) |
You receive a call | Maximum 0.2 eurocent per minute of the received call |
You send an SMS | Maximum 1.2 eurocent per SMS in addition to the domestic tariff (0.3 eurocent as of 2025) |
You receive an SMS | No surcharge possible |
You surf the Internet | Maximum 0.34 eurocent per megabyte in addition to the domestic tariff (0.2 eurocent as of 2025) |