Was this written a decade ago? Iβm fairly sure a standard phone plan in any EU country works identically elsewhere in the EU.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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This is not about you travelling to another country and using your phone. This is about you using your phone to call a number in another EU country. The EU is now trying to close that gap so that calling somebody in France from Spain costs the same as calling somebody in Spain.
Until a certain point. From what I remember there was a minimum allowance and then a standardised rate applies. I could be wrong tho.
The SMS messages that my provider sends me when they see I have crossed a border explicitly state there are no extra costs. Minutes/bytes are taken at the same rate from the same bundle.
My Swiss cellphone plan has been offering free calls and texts to all EU countries as well as UK,NO,US,CA,AU,NZ,JP,China for years. Is that such a rarity? I havenβt paid anything for calls and texting in years, not even when roaming.
I donβt have a super expensive Plan either, itβs just 40 CHF/ month with unlimited domestic data and 50GB roaming per month in all the above countries.
40 CHF/month is a super expensive plan, I pay <20CHF with spusu, unlimited in CH and 10g, 100 minutes, 100 sms in EU
Do you have free calls back to Switzerland and other countries when roaming in Germany (or any of the other countries I listed)? I am in Germany almost every second day and need to make calls to the US pretty much daily.
With my usage pattern this is definitely the cheapest plan, I did a lot of research.
Spusu is absolutely a great value if you mostly need your phone for data when abroad though, but in my case calls are still a big deal.
I dont actually know because I make (non-Whatsapp) calls like once a month or less, so whatever I do my bill stays below 20CHF/month. But yes agreed, sounds like a cheap plan for a power user like you!
Interesting, because it does not work the other way around. I am in Germany Within the EU/ most EU countries, roaming is free. But not in Switzerland. Whenever you go near Switzerland, everyone has to make sure to turn off their cellphone data and/or remember to turn off roaming, otherwise one pays about 6β¬/GB.
All my German co-workers and anyone living near the border are with T-Mobile, Fraenk or Congstar because they include roaming in Switzerland. Apparently o2 and vodafone are just greedy because they can. All french and italian providers include Swiss roaming too.
I get the same thing but within EU only for 30 PLN per month, on prepaid (7,3β¬/mo)
And that's why it would be impotant to include roaming data in this agreement as well: let the market decide the price, not national monopolies. Right now you can only subscribe to phone plans in your country of residence, because roam-like-at-home is limited to a few weeks per year and restricted to "reasonable use".
Which provider?
Here I am with my 3,99β¬/month plan that once had to pay 59β¬ for a whopping 12MB of Swiss data traffic that were gone in seconds when using phone navigation driving into Basel... Then again, 10Gb is more than enough for my mobile needs, and the EU is also included for calls/SMS/Data afaik.
For me, Baltics and Nordics are included, rest of EU is capped to like 10 gigs a month and 1000 texts, but I seldom hit that.