be careful if you go to the neighboring country this vacation
25 years with the same phone company makes you think. Why change the contract if everything is fine? “Since I had my first mobile, I have always been with Vodafone. I even made my daughters and my wife come to the company”, says Abel Campos. However, a simple trip to Andorra has changed the perception of this consumer. “I have been charged 250 euros more on the bill for roaming”, he details.
This Valencian set out to spend a few days with his family with his wife and two daughters in the country, but the trip ended in an important neighbor “sablazo” in the mobile bill. all because of the roaming. This service, which allows using the network abroad with the same rate of origin, only applies to countries that are part of the European Economic Area. And… Attention! Andorra is not on that list.
Roaming is paid in Andorra
Contrary to what happens when traveling to countries of the European Union, both receiving and making calls and surfing the internet in the neighboring country have an extra cost that the operators charge. “We called the company from a town in Catalonia, before entering, to ask if roaming was included and the teleoperator told us that it was,” says Abel Campos.
According to this user Global Consumer“The worker told us that the four lines that we have contracted with the company had roaming included and that we could enjoy the red mobile As always, he even gave us the steps to activate it once we entered the country.” However, the 250 euros that Campos found on the bill for the following month confirmed that, in fact, roaming in Andorra is not free.
Is it misinformation on the part of the operators or in spite of the clients?
Four mobiles connected to a foreign local network for four days. This represented an important expense since, although with few calls, Campos assured, there was a lot of consumption of Mobile data, “especially my daughters who, at 19 and 20 years old, connect continuously to the Internet”. The family complained to Vodafone about that “error” of the teleoperator, but could not do anything because they did not have the recorded call.
is disinformation on the part of the operators that denounce some consumers are not reduced only to the case of Vodafone. Ixone Núñez recounts that a telephone operator from movistar It made her “very convinced” that Andorra belonged to Europe and, therefore, the rates were the same as in Spain. But it’s not like that. However, some companies and organizations insist that users and consumers can already know this information in advance.
The rates if you travel to the neighboring country
According to Núñez laments, they were necessary until five calls with different teleoperators to find out what roaming really costs there with, for example, Movistar: 9 euros for 3 gigabytes of mobile data. Núñez recounts that, in the end, he opted for hiring a prepaid card to “avoid scares.”
In the case of Orange, the price per megabyte consumed is 12.10 euros. The company offers a bonus of 100 megabytes for 7 euros per day. Meanwhile, Vodafone works 6.05 euros per megabyte and its World Trip voucher allows you to use 2 gigabytes per day and unlimited calls for 15 euros per day. As for the cost of calls, all companies charge around 1.82 euros per minute, in addition to 1.21 euros for call establishment.
Operators must notify if there is a network change
Mariano Ibáñez, a technician from one of the consumer offices in Spain, explains to this medium that “more than misinformation, the cases of complaints that occur due to roaming in Andorra have to do with the involuntary connections to the network for road trips around the country”. And it is that there is the possibility that if a mobile passes near the border it will connect to a local antenna.
In those cases, operators must notify customers that they have connected to a network other than the national one. “What is valued in arbitrations of this type to check if the user is right is to see if that information has been guaranteed by the operators,” remarks Ibáñez. Daniel Escalona, head of the Mediation, Claims and Arbitration Service of the Andalusian Consumer Councilagrees that “the key here is whether the customer has been informed by SMS” and recalls that, although rates have been unified in the EU, roaming complaints are still the order of the day, “especially in border areas and cruise ships.
A political and economic issue
Roaming responds to a economic system and agreements between mobile operators in which they charge for providing services outside the European Union. “It is not a question of technology, but of economic agreements. In a country like Andorra, your operator in Spain can provide you with the service with its antennas without any problem”, explains María Guijarro, professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Guijarro believes that one of the options that can be cheaper in cases where you travel to countries that do not belong to the EU, is to hire a virtual SIM cards with a local operator, “although in this way we are duplicating our data and our information so that more operators have us located”, he concludes. In short, something that must be sacrificed in any case.
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