Charges for receiving calls from overseas

[hansi]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bil...sten-them.html

I guess if you don't have roaming set up and turn off mobile data and/or wifi, you won't get charged?

[Stop It]

Originally Posted by hansi

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bil...sten-them.html

I guess if you don't have roaming set up and turn off mobile data and/or wifi, you won't get charged?

If people are on O2 they should download TU Go, that way they can use Wi-Fi (Which most hotels should have nowadays) and be able to make and receive calls including voicemail anywhere and it'll count as being in the UK so would use your allowed minutes.

I was advised about it by an O2 CS agent because my signal indoors in my home is terrible and it's a godsend really.

Anyway, nothing really new here, calling voicemail abroad has always charged. Annoying, but a reminder to be careful when using your phone on holiday or business overseas.

[hansi]

But I'm on Virgin so that doesn't apply to me. Doesn't really answer my question.

[japitts]

I'm really not sure what the Daily Whale is trying to say here. Is it the scenario of an incoming call whilst you're roaming, being busied out to answerphone - you're then paying for both "legs" of that call? If so, Orange certainly got rid of those charges quite a few years back and I'd be extremely surprised if EE for one has brought them back in.

If their "story" is something else, then I hope someone else can explain...

[blackthorn]

I think there is something new here, thanks for pointing it out. I think the answer here is to turn off voicemail before you leave the UK.
In the past when I`ve been on hol in Egypt, if someone left a voicemail, I`d get the message to say I`ve got new voicemail. If I ignored that and didnt listen, then I didnt get charged but it looks like they are now charging even if I dont listen to it.

What they are saying is, if you are outside the EU, and someone phones you, and they get diverted to your voicemail, as soon as they hear the beep, the meter is running. Your mobile operator charges you as if you were answering the call, for as long as the caller is recording their message.

If you later dial in to your voicemail to listen to the message, then you get charged again for that call. It seems that the only way of avoiding this is to set your voicemail to advisory message only, and prevent anyone leaving you a message while you're outside the EU.

[Stop It]

Originally Posted by Chris

What they are saying is, if you are outside the EU, and someone phones you, and they get diverted to your voicemail, as soon as they hear the beep, the meter is running. Your mobile operator charges you as if you were answering the call, for as long as the caller is recording their message.

If you later dial in to your voicemail to listen to the message, then you get charged again for that call. It seems that the only way of avoiding this is to set your voicemail to advisory message only, and prevent anyone leaving you a message while you're outside the EU.

Ah, that's a bit cheeky. I can avoid calling voicemail while abroad but didn't know that outside the EU that you would be charged for even getting the message in the first place. With my work I only travel in the EU so that didn't cross my mind, apologies to the OP.

Good idea with the voicemail settings too.

[nomadking]

In order for a call to go to voicemail, a call has to be made and not answered. At least during that time there is an international phone connection. What happens in the event of somebody answering the call during any leaving of a voicemail? Is the voicemail interrupted and you can speak to the caller? I don't know how the system works. If so, then during that time the connection to the receivers phone has to be constantly active. That would be a set of valid reasons for this charging. If this is the case then perhaps there needs to be an option of not being able to interrupt an active voicemail, thereby avoiding the extra cost.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by blackthorn

I think there is something new here, thanks for pointing it out. I think the answer here is to turn off voicemail before you leave the UK.

This isn't new. This has been recommended by the networks themselves for over fifteen years.

---------- Post added at 17:02 ---------- Previous post was at 16:59 ----------

Originally Posted by nomadking

In order for a call to go to voicemail, a call has to be made and not answered. At least during that time there is an international phone connection. What happens in the event of somebody answering the call during any leaving of a voicemail? Is the voicemail interrupted and you can speak to the caller? I don't know how the system works.

No. The system does not work that way. The voicemail system has nothing to do with the phone. It's an underlying redirect in the GSM that sends the call to a machine somewhere else. There is no connection to the user's handset. They cannot answer the call during the voicemail being left because the call has already been sent somewhere else.

[jb66]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

This isn't new. This has been recommended by the networks themselves for over fifteen years.

---------- Post added at 17:02 ---------- Previous post was at 16:59 ----------


No. The system does not work that way. The voicemail system has nothing to do with the phone. It's an underlying redirect in the GSM that sends the call to a machine somewhere else. There is no connection to the user's handset. They cannot answer the call during the voicemail being left because the call has already been sent somewhere else.

If the call is not answered it is not sent to the country you are roaming in, it is sent to your voicemail provider which operates in the UK, I cant see how they justify a roaming charge

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Stop It

Ah, that's a bit cheeky. I can avoid calling voicemail while abroad but didn't know that outside the EU that you would be charged for even getting the message in the first place. With my work I only travel in the EU so that didn't cross my mind, apologies to the OP.

You don't always get charged, it depends on what you set up and how. In short, you get charged if you originate a divert while abroad, because your mobile operator has to pay for the international call there and back. You do not get charged if the divert originates in the UK.

Firstly, to clarify to those who don't know, 'Voicemail' isn't a special magical black box. Going to voicemail is a normal phone call, handled by the GSM divert system. It is an ordinary phone call, and involves calling an ordinary phone number.

Without going into too much technical nitty gritty detail, the GSM divert system essentially has three modes of operation: Always, Busy/unanswered, and unreachable.

If you set up an 'Always' divert before you leave the UK, you do not get charged. Your home operator sends the call straight to voicemail without it ever going abroad.

If you use a busy/unanswered divert, the call first gets sent abroad to your foreign operator who sends a message to your handset telling it to ring. If you then reject the call, the handset sends a message back to the foreign operator's switchboard, and uses the foreign switchboard to connect the call to your UK voicemail number. This entails a charge because the call is going abroad and you are using the foreign operator's switchboard to set up a call back to your answering machine in the UK. Your network has to pay for this so historically they pass this charge on to the customer. Sometimes, they leave it out as an act of goodwill, or because of more modern interconnects that negate the additional step of sending it abroad and back again.

If you use an 'unreachable' divert, you do not get charged. Your home operator has nowhere to send the call, so it defaults to it going to voicemail, again without going abroad in the first place. Theoretically, if your phone rings, and then you pull out the battery without pressing reject, then the network reverts to this mode of operation. This used to be an interesting way of avoiding certain charges, many years ago...

---------- Post added at 17:21 ---------- Previous post was at 17:21 ----------

Originally Posted by jb66

If the call is not answered it is not sent to the country you are roaming in, it is sent to your voicemail provider which operates in the UK, I cant see how they justify a roaming charge

See my above post. If your phone rings, then your call does get sent abroad. If your phone does not ring, your call does not get sent abroad and there is no charge. At least that's how it used to work and how it's supposed to work, but knowing EE's horrifically retarded and buggy billing systems I would not be surprised if it couldn't make the distinction.

[jb66]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

You don't always get charged, it depends on what you set up and how. In short, you get charged if you originate a divert while abroad, because your mobile operator has to pay for the international call there and back. You do not get charged if the divert originates in the UK.

Firstly, to clarify to those who don't know, 'Voicemail' isn't a special magical black box. Going to voicemail is a normal phone call, handled by the GSM divert system. It is an ordinary phone call, and involves calling an ordinary phone number.

Without going into too much technical nitty gritty detail, the GSM divert system essentially has three modes of operation: Always, Busy/unanswered, and unreachable.

If you set up an 'Always' divert before you leave the UK, you do not get charged. Your home operator sends the call straight to voicemail without it ever going abroad.

If you use a busy/unanswered divert, the call first gets sent abroad to your foreign operator who sends a message to your handset telling it to ring. If you then reject the call, the handset sends a message back to the foreign operator's switchboard, and uses the foreign switchboard to connect the call to your UK voicemail number. This entails a charge because the call is going abroad and you are using the foreign operator's switchboard to set up a call back to your answering machine in the UK. Your network has to pay for this so they pass the charge on to you.

If you use an 'unreachable' divert, you do not get charged. Your home operator has nowhere to send the call, so it defaults to it going to voicemail, again without going abroad in the first place.

---------- Post added at 17:21 ---------- Previous post was at 17:21 ----------


See my above post. If your phone rings, then your call does get sent abroad. If your phone does not ring, your call does not get sent abroad and there is no charge.

If my phone rings and then the person hangs up, I don't get charged as I never answered the call.

When my phone rings and then goes to voicemail, it stops ringing abroad and then gets diverted to my voicemail. If what is actually happening is that the call goes from uk to spain, back to uk again thats a stupid system.

When the call goes to voicemail, EE should terminate the call and then dial directly to my voicemail

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by jb66

If my phone rings and then the person hangs up, I don't get charged as I never answered the call.

Correct. As I stated above, when your phone rings, it is simply instructed to ring by your foreign operator who hold the call in an unanswered state - there is never an actual 'connected call' happening.

When my phone rings and then goes to voicemail, it stops ringing abroad and then gets diverted to my voicemail. If what is actually happening is that the call goes from uk to spain, back to uk again thats a stupid system.

It's the system that has been allowing you to use your phone and number abroad for the last twenty years. The divert system doesn't work optimally in this scenario as it was never designed to be used in this manner.

When the call goes to voicemail, EE should terminate the call and then dial directly to my voicemail

The whole reason roaming works is because the foreign operator 'takes over' a vast majority of the functions of your home network, so your phone can't tell EE anything, it's connected to the foreign network, it can only tell your foreign network to send the call to voicemail.

Believe it or not, with some less-advanced networks your caller even has to then enter your phone number once connected to your voicemail, because your caller ID is dropped on the return leg so the answering machine cannot tell whose phone the incoming message is for.

* The ability to pass through commands from a roaming network to your home operator does vary by network and technology, so some are better than others at this. It's all very inconsistent when you have a smattering of every technology and roaming agreement set up over the last two decades

[japitts]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

See my above post. If your phone rings, then your call does get sent abroad. If your phone does not ring, your call does not get sent abroad and there is no charge. At least that's how it used to work and how it's supposed to work, but knowing EE's horrifically retarded and buggy billing systems I would not be surprised if it couldn't make the distinction.

Orange changed their call setup procedure quite a while back now, if a call is sent to a foreign roaming network and is "busied" to answerphone, then the call is never actually released from the UK. To put it another way, unless the user actually answers the incoming call - that is the point when incoming call charges start to apply.

This has been "BAU standard procedure" in Orange's core network for as long as I can remember - I would think it has been carried across to EE.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by japitts

Orange changed their call setup procedure quite a while back now, if a call is sent to a foreign roaming network and is "busied" to answerphone, then the call is never actually released from the UK. To put it another way, unless the user actually answers the incoming call - that is the point when incoming call charges start to apply.

This has been "BAU standard procedure" in Orange's core network for as long as I can remember - I would think it has been carried across to EE.

Yeah I know it's not so arcane on all networks. However most of EE is built on top of T-Mobile's core network with Orange core and edge kit getting discarded.