No change expected for roaming bills

If you were hoping for a change of policy by mobile phone providers so that when you roam you would not have to pay for unwanted received calls on your mobile - bad news, you're not to be satisfied, say local providers Go Mobile and Vodafone.

Go Mobile spokesman Franco Aloisio said that the roaming concept all over the world was that whoever was roaming abroad would foot his mobile telephone bill.

There were no countries which had a system where the person making a phone call got a message informing him that the person he was calling was roaming.

"This could be encroaching on the privacy of the person who is roaming. To specify that one is roaming goes against the very nature of roaming."

He said that the beauty of roaming was that a person could take his mobile phone wherever he was going and if he did not want to receive calls and only wanted to use the phone to make calls, he could bar the phone from receiving calls.

A roamer, Mr Aloisio said, knew what the costs of roaming were and was free to decide whether or not to take them.

Asked about the possibility of a roamer seeing the number of his caller so that he could then decide whether or not to take the call, the spokesman said that many operators were involved in roaming and not all of them supported this feature.

He said it was international policy for one not to receive the telephone number of people making the call when roaming.

Vodafone (Malta) chairman Joseph Grioli said it would be unreasonable for the calling party, who was not informed of the location of the called party, to foot the costs of the international component of the call, when he was expecting that all he was doing was a local call.

"It is surely more reasonable that the called party, who has chosen to use his mobile phone while abroad, to foot that part of the costs for the international component of the call.

"This is the reasoning behind this charging principle for roaming calls, which is widely adopted within the industry."