Good news just ahead of the main tourist season.
Roaming charges for mobile phone users within the European Union have been discontinued and phone services will be charged at normal rates. Visitors coming from the rest of the European Union will make phone calls from Croatia just like as if they were going to spend the summer at a nearby lake near their town or village. Croats traveling to the rest of the EU will also pay for phone calls at the same cost as if they were still in Croatia, reports Večernji List on June 15, 2017.
However, users should be careful, since this does not mean that calls from mobile phones with Croatian SIM card to numbers in the rest of the EU are also free of extra charge. Such international calls will still be charged, and sometimes at very high rates because these are not roaming calls, but regular international calls.
Experts from the European Commission say that the EU did not want to interfere with the regulations concerning the rates for international calls because the market is regulated by itself, given the fact that there are many services which offer cheap calls over the Internet from smartphones.
The new European roaming regulation obliges telecom operators not to charge users a special roaming fee but allows them to refer to the “fair use” principle. This means that, if they notice that someone is using their SIM card mostly abroad and not in the country where the SIM card was bought, they may warn the user that they are about to start charging special charges for roaming because they suspect misuse.
However, some EU member states and operators in these countries do not have the intent to invoke the fair use principle: they will not check up on their users because that would require additional investments, but will rather rely on the assumption that they can be trusted. In some countries, operators do not intend to control fair use in calls and text messages, but will in data traffic.
In Croatia, however, operators have not given up on the monitoring of fair use. The HAKOM regulatory agency explains that “mobile operators can contact you in case they see potential misuse based on the balance of roaming activities and domestic activities over a period of four months.” If you spend more time using the phone in other EU countries than in Croatia for a period of four months, the operator may ask you to explain the reasons for doing so within 14 days. If they are not satisfied with the explanation and you continue to use roaming services more than your home country services, the operator may charge you an additional roaming fee for all roaming traffic,” warns HAKOM. This fee may not be higher than the fee prescribed by the European regulations.
