Internet article: 3 forced to take action on data roaming charges as customers face "bill shocks"

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Mobile operator 3 have removed the default roaming facility on its mobile broadband services to protect its customers from potential excessive data roaming charges.

Customers travelling to European countries that have 3 networks will have the roaming setting enabled by default, however those roaming outside of Europe will have to contact 3 to enable this.

There have been recent incidents where customers have racked up several thousands of pounds whilst abroad, therefore 3 has brought in these new measures to prevent data roamers incurring any further “bill shocks”.

Kevin Russell, chief executive of 3 UK said "Because of the huge disparity between what we charge on our own networks and the costs charged by many networks for wholesale roaming across Europe, which we are forced to pass on to the customer, we have decided to make a data-roaming bar the default for our contract mobile broadband customers."

Russell added that contract customers were still able to use their mobile broadband modems in "non 3 markets", but said that even in such cases a £50 credit limit would be set up on the account to avoid thousands of pounds worth of charges building up.

European countries with 3 networks include the UK, Austria, Denmark, Italy and Sweden, and 3 customers roaming between these networks incur no extra charges. Other networks such as T-Mobile and O2 do have European roaming charges, which we have seen recently.

"We have seen customers on other networks run up bills of more than £4,000 just for downloading a couple of TV shows," said Russell. "We believe we have to draw attention to this issue as the use of dongles is growing rapidly and many more customers are in danger of being affected by bill shock this summer."

Data roaming costs are increasingly under scrutiny after the European Commission forced operators last year to cut their voice roaming rates within Europe.

The commission set a deadline for the start of July by which operators should have voluntarily dropped their data and SMS roaming rates. It is now possible that the information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding will place further regulation on operators to ensure this happens.

To view all of 3's mobile broadband packages out there at the moment, visit our 3 Mobile Broadband page.

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