Fone Forum

'3', recently heard shouting that it wants to see termination fees cut, is quietly dropping its '3 Like Home' tariff, which offered international roaming with no additional fees.

The tariff will cease to exist at the end of June, though punters who recently renewed on the basis of the service, and have made use of it, should be able to get out of their contracts.  This is despite the fact '3' is now claiming that the tariff was "promotional", and could have been pulled at any time.

'3 Like Home' was launched in January 2007 and allowed customers roaming to other countries in which '3' operates to use their tariff, including data, as though they were at home.  It seemed to address one of travellers' most vigorous complaints - why should I pay roaming fees when I'm on the same company's network in a different country?

'3' claims it's pulling the tariff in order to be able to offer "more competitive" prices when roaming off the '3' network, and that the tariff confused customers who accidentally roamed onto a different network while travelling and found themselves unexpectedly being charged international roaming rates.

Making cancellation available only to those who've made good use of the service has annoyed at least one customer, who signed up to the service in order to provide connectivity ahead of a planned migration to Australia.  But the network is apparently investigating, and may yet concede in that case.

Roaming data remains prohibitively expensive, as demonstrated at the relaunched MobileMeg (http://www.mobilemeg.com/) site which compares costs to help users planning on travelling; '3 Like Home' offered a simple way to reduce the cost of using data abroad, so obviously it had to go.

See:-   The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/20/3_like_home/).

I dont know if TheReg is slow to react to this or is repeating it. 3's position is rather odd, as it is the only network to have increased roaming rates, and their termination deep are higher.

My guess would be that this is a quite deliberate repeat.

'3' are posturing as the consumers' champion in wanting reduced termination charges, yet are removing the benefit that their customers enjoyed on their like home tariff.

The real story behind both is, I suspect, to save money.  As '3' is a small network compared with the big 4, more of its calls go to other networks than they make back to '3'.  They therefore lose out in having to pay more termination charges to the others than they can get back from them ( even though their own charge is the highest during week days. )

The posturing as the consumers's champion is simply good PR therefore - window dressing for wanting to reduce their costs by lowering the termination charges they have to pay to their bigger rivals.