Foreign Calling

Holidays shouldn't have to be a time to worry about mundane, niggling little problems. But it's more often than not that the stress created from booking travel and hotel arrangements, leaving the cat with a relative for the week, and remembering that the boiler is still on when you're halfway to the airport is almost enough to warrant a second holiday to recover from the first. Luckily, one of those irritating issues is now history.

Mobile phone 'roaming charges', otherwise known as the surplus fee that is added to the sending (and sometimes receiving) of a text or call abroad, are currently in the region £1/min for Pay As You Go customers calling in Europe, and £1.50/min to call anywhere else in the world, with Pay Monthly customers paying up to 85p/min more than the normal amount. By summer, however, this extra charge will be avoidable with network operators Vodafone offering special summer rates to their mobile phone customers, meaning they can recline on a sun kissed beach in whichever is their chosen destination without being concerned about returning home to find a worryingly sized bill, just as a result of sending and receiving a couple of messages.

In an age flooded with countless forms of easy and cheap telecommunications, the mobile phone roaming charges seem an unnecessary expense. Social networking sites are nowadays used daily by most people of an age where they can efficiently recite the alphabet, and most of these have a 'chat' function of some sort. All it requires for you to get in touch with friends anywhere in the world is to find an internet cafe. Similarly, programmes such as Skype allow for global telephonic, and sometimes visual, communication, at a pittance of a cost, and even landlines can connect you to Australia at a rate of 1p/min.

It makes complete sense for mobiles to abolish this charge, as the competition provided by the above mentioned methods of communication tends to result in people following one of two routes, with regards to their phones abroad: they either wince painfully whenever they send a text, knowing that it will cost them more than a Paris metro fare, or they just switch off their phones for the duration of the holiday.

The latter option not being much good for service providers, and the former leading to far fewer calls or texts being used, the abandonment of the roaming charge is, like the holiday itself, a much deserved and welcome break.