Have you been hit by holiday mobile bill shock?

A few weeks ago I was asked for advice by a lady who’d just arrived home from an involuntary extended stay in Singapore, courtesy of the ash cloud. A distressing experience in itself, but made worse by receiving an unexpected mobile bill for several hundred pounds for her Singapore mobile phone use.

The rise and fall of calling costs

The cost of mobile calling within the UK is at an all-time low; even the biggest chatterboxes are unlikely to be hit by a mobile bill that will break the bank.

And affordable mobile pricing is starting to extend to using our mobiles overseas. I was delighted to hear the mobile giants lost their bid to overturn price capping in EU countries. This means the European Commission’s rules to ensure mobile operators charge fair prices will remain firmly in place.

The rules are straightforward and reasonable. From 1 July 2010, when you use your mobile in EU countries mobile operators must:

• Charge no more than €0.39 (about 32p) per minute to make calls, €0.15 per minute to receive calls and €0.11 to send texts (it’s free to receive texts).
• Apply an automatic cut-off once your bill reaches €50 (about £42), unless you choose another cut-off limit.
• Keep you well-informed of charges for using your mobile abroad, sending an information text when you arrive at your destination.

But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – the rules only apply in EU countries. Use your mobile further afield, and operators can charge what they like. You have no protection against running up bills of hundreds – or even thousands – of pounds. Sounds crazy, but it’s been known to happen, as the student who ran up an £8,000 Orange bill in a month from using his mobile’s internet service in Paris discovered.

Mobile call rates outside of EU countries often exceed £1 a minute. If you were lucky (or even unlucky) enough to have tickets to a World Cup match in South Africa, you might have come home to a hefty bill. T-Mobile customers, for example, would have paid £1.50 a minute to make or receive calls. And don’t get me started on the extortionate cost of using the mobile internet…

Take some responsibility, mobile operators

Part of the problem is that there isn’t a worldwide equivalent of the European Commission to regulate the cost mobile operators charge on an international scale. But surely the mobile operators should be able to negotiate with each other and voluntarily apply some of the sensible protections the EC has put in place?

Sure, as mobile users we must take some responsibility for staying informed of the cost of services we subscribe to. But even if lowering costs is a step too far for mobile operators, they should be more proactive about providing cost information rather than relying on us to seek it out. And now the technology’s in place to apply a cut-off limit to mobile spending in Europe, it seems a no-brainer to extend this to worldwide use.

In the meantime, anyone who plans to use their mobile abroad should check the charges in advance – and make use of Which? tips on how to keep costs down.

And my advice to the lady who’d been stranded by the ash cloud? Frustratingly the best suggestion I could make was to throw herself on her mobile provider’s mercy and hope for the best. Surely there must be a better way.