From mid-2017 those unlimited plans need to carry over while roaming without surcharge. They can however switch off the connection after you reached a (yet to be defined) limit to stop perpetual roamers, i.e. those buying SIM cards from countries other than their residence.
>(yet to be defined) limit to stop perpetual roamers, i.e. those buying SIM cards from countries other than their residence.
I'm tempted to say they should allow perpetual roamers.
That throttled plan I mentioned is sufficiently slow that nobody sane will actually use it long term. Only tourists will use it (google maps & lost) and people utterly desperate for communication. Now if you think about Norway etc introducing broadband internet as a human right then I think we can throw people a bone and give free 384kbps free (thats roughly what it felt like - baring the freakish FB voice working).
384kbps is really at a point where one can say fk it the community will take the financial hit for the greater good. If everyone is guaranteed the ability to send whatsapp/telegram/fb messengers to loved ones & friends that'll save us all a good amount of grief.
For context: It still connects at HSDPA/LTE speeds @ physical link but the throughput is 384kbps - picking that number because I used to be on 384 DSL as a reference point...not because I measured it.
For international travel I use a Project Fi SIM card that provides data roaming at 256kbps. While web sites load slightly slower, I'm otherwise perfectly happy with 256kbps roaming.
One potential issue is that data prices in the EU differ quite a lot between countries. For example, I have an Austrian drei.at prepaid card where I pay around 10 EUR per month for 10 GB of data (I have to recharge the card at least once a year so that it doesn't expire). In some other European countries the price for one GB of data is more like 10 EUR instead of 1 EUR.
So one of the use-cases for perpetual roaming is to buy "cheap" SIM cards from another country and to then use them in your (more expensive) home country, which would lead to an asymmetric roaming behavior between the two providers (so one of those providers would have to pay the other one).
My example was about retail prices: You're correct that due to clearinghouse there are hardly any charges exchanged - as in most cases the outgoing roaming volume of a provider is comparable to the incoming roaming volume.
But if you have two countries where retail prices differ a lot, this can lead to people from both countries to buy SIM cards from the cheaper country, causing an asymmetry in the roaming volume: Now suddenly one provider has lots of outgoing roaming, but much less incoming roaming - which means that this provider is going to have to pay the wholesale prices for the difference in roaming volume.
