EU Parliament made the decision today to compel mobile operators to considerably reduce the costs of phone calls and internet traffic made by roaming users. More precisely, the price of a MB of internet traffic will cost a maximum of €0.70 starting from July, €0.45 starting from 2013 and will stop at €0.20 in 2014. The price is much lower than that charged by some operators for the internet traffic made in Romania, so there is a good chance that these domestic prices will also decrease, at least out of common sense.
Come July, the cost of mobile data will be a maximum lei3.09 (€0.70) (approximatelylei3.07 ($0.90)) per megabyte, which will fall to lei1.99 (€0.45)/MB (lei2.05 ($0.60) ) in 2013 and finally to 0.88 lei (€0.20) per MB (0.85 lei ($0.25)) by July 2014.
Regarding phone calls made while roaming, the maximum price of a minute of conversation will be 0.29€ starting from July and until 2014 it will reach the value of 0.19€ for each minute of conversation. SMS are not forgotten either, and by 2014 the price of an SMS will be reduced to €0.08. None of the above prices include VAT and none obliges operators to practice them in the case of internal calls, so there is always a chance that we can talk cheaper in roaming than in our own country.
Calls are also seeing a reduction: from July 1st, a one minute call will be limited to lei1.28 (€0.29) (~lei1.37 ($0.40)), falling to lei0.84 (€0.19) by 2014. There' ll also be a cap on SMS messages to lei0.49 (€0.11) (lei0.51 ($0.15)) from July which will in turn drop to lei0.27 (€0.06) (lei0.27 ($0.08)) in two years time.
