Mobile Roaming Charges Abolished!
None of us know how much we’ll be charged to make a mobile call to friends abroad or to call back home from holiday. But we do know it’s expensive, which is why we don’t bother. Truphone, the mobile operator for the hippy Internet age has revealed a new pricing structure that means roaming charges have vanished completely for its customers.
From anywhere in the galaxy, Truphone customers can call countries in its ‘Tru Zone’, on their mobile, at the fabulously low rates of just 3p per minute to landlines and 15p per minute to mobiles.
The 40 countries in the Tru Zone together account for 60% of the world’s mobile phones and include most EU countries, Australia, Japan and Russia. Calls to some countries - including China, Hong Kong, U.S. and Canada - will cost even less, at just 3p per minute to both landlines and mobiles.
The potential savings can quickly mount up. At current prices, a 10-minute call home from your European ski holiday to a UK landline on Vodafone’s International Call Saver option (which attracts a monthly £2.50 charge just to be on it) will cost £3.80, while the same call with Truphone costs a mere 30p. Worse still, for those calling home from the U.S., perhaps from your Disneyland hotel, a 10-minute call on the same Vodafone tariff will currently set you back an eye-watering £11 - but the same call with Truphone still costs just 30p.
Truphone has also killed off roaming charges for receiving mobile calls abroad, something that routinely catches us all out as many don’t realise that we pay a high price for inbound calls. Receiving a call abroad costs absolutely nothing with Truphone - yet that same holidaymaker in Disneyland with Vodafone’s International Call Saver option is currently charged 75 pence per minute to answer a call from home. The same customer is only marginally better off accepting an inbound call in Europe, where accepting an inbound call costs 19 pence per minute.
So how does this magic work? Because it routes calls over Wi-Fi and the Internet, Truphone’s tariff structure relates solely to the destination being called, and whether that destination is a landline or a mobile. Where the call is made from becomes irrelevant, making roaming charges redundant. Truphone-to-Truphone calls remain free, no matter where in the world the two parties are.
