Making an outgoing call when roaming

You are in a foreign country, and your phone has decided which network to log onto (see the Roaming page for details of this). You decide to make a phone call...

Getting permission

The handset contacts the base station (BTS), asking for access. The BTS passes the request back and it reaches your home network's HLR, which checks that your account is allowed roaming facilities. The reply comes back, and your phone is permitted to register. The VLR allocates your account a temporary phone number, but you never get to know what this is. There is also some traffic about authentication, which is discussed in the Encrypytion page.

Billing you

Whenever you make a call, it is handled as any other call from the mobile network you are using, except that the call charges may be higher to make up for the fact that you are not paying line rental. Note that your home mobile network will probably add a percentage to cover the costs of collecting and paying the call charges to the roamed-to network. Sometimes these charges can take three months to appear on your bill.

Even though UK mobile networks bill by the second with no minimum call charge, most other networks charge a minimum of one minute, and don't forget that calling your voicemail/answerphone is an international call!

It's not cheap!

You and your phone are in the roamed-to country, so calls to that country may be based on domestic call rates (though most of the networks have "simplified" the charges up so they are as expensive as an international call), and calls back home will be at international rates, even if that call is to another UK mobile roaming in the same country. Ringing the mobile of the person next to you could involve sending the call on a two-way international divert, which isn't free!

PAYG roaming

To allow pay as you go (PAYG) users to use roaming, it is necessary to update billing records very quickly, and many networks now us a real-time billing system called CAMEL. This reduces credit in real time when calls are made, allowing PAYG users to use their mobile phones in other countries.

The networks have some financial incentive to allow roaming on PAYG, because the charges are usually very high indeed - possibly as high as £1.50 per minute for incoming and outgoing calls, even if you are just across the English Channel.

See also [ Roaming ] : [ Incoming call when roaming ] : [ Encrypytion ]

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