Calculate the mobile phone costs abroad
When on vacation in particular, it is particularly tempting to contact loved ones at home by mobile phone or to be available to friends. Except perhaps a third-party provider logo, there is nothing to suggest that you should be careful when using your mobile phone when you are abroad. At home, there is often a surprise when there are horrific mobile phone costs for international calls. These instructions explain how to calculate mobile phone costs when you are abroad. That's how it's done!
Although the word has got around by now, many mobile phone users still stumble into the cost trap of roaming charges. While the use of your own cellular network in Germany is billed to your own cellular provider and has now become quite cheap, in the foreign countries the cell phone cost situation has been different so far. There you usually use the network infrastructure of a third-party mobile phone provider. The own provider practically has to pay rent for the use of the external network. With its own heavy surcharge, the mobile phone provider then recovers these costs in the form of roaming charges, which are levied for each use of a foreign network. These determine the high costs of international calls.
This is how the mobile phone costs are composed
- If you call Germany from abroad, you have to pay a roaming fee every time, depending on the duration of the call.
- Caution! Even if you have someone call you abroad, you bear a substantial part of the mobile phone costs yourself! You cannot avoid the high roaming charges by only being called when you are abroad. You should therefore also switch the Mailbox - otherwise you will have to pay double the costs.
- Even SMS- Messages generally cost you a different tariff abroad.
- A key factor is the use of mobile data services such as UMTS abroad. Even if you have a data flat rate in Germany, every single megabyte is charged dearly abroad. Unneeded use of a Smartphones abroad could cost you thousands of euros up to now! Switch off all mobile data traffic except WLAN use.
Sending SMS to a German cell phone in Italy costs the same as ...
- You can look up the exact amount of the additional costs for each of these actions on the homepage of your respective mobile phone provider or in your Mobile phone contract look up. Depending on the mobile phone provider, the tariffs are very different here.
- If you know in advance that you will have to make a lot of calls abroad, some offer you Providers offer special tariffs for international use, which are particularly suitable for frequent callers can pay off.
- There are now also offers for a data flat rate abroad.
The European Union caps the costs in other EU countries
Due to the surprising mobile phone costs for consumers, the European Union has decided to somewhat mitigate these cost traps.
- So that several thousand euros are no longer due for possibly unnoticed data usage on smartphones, all providers must now If you reach a certain amount or a certain data volume, reduce the data usage in order to avoid costs for the user maintain. Some turn off data traffic when the limit is reached, others slow it down so much that much more than reading e-mails becomes impossible.
- The cost of accepting calls abroad was set at a maximum of 19 cents per minute, the cost of calls to Germany at 49 cents per minute.
- The most pleasing is the maximum value of 11 cents for an SMS. This can be cheaper than agreed in some national tariffs.
- Caution! Outside of Europe, these legal limits do not have to apply!
With these values you can now at least get the maximum cost per minute for the Cell phone use estimate abroad. Especially if you only want to make very little calls, these legally stipulated maximum costs should be significantly cheaper than the special international tariffs of the mobile phone providers. These are not subject to this limitation.
