this is total nonsense. I pay 15 quid /month for unlimited data
I don’t doubt that, but
I stand by what I said about connectivity. Obviously, as the Americans say, YMMV. For example, people who revolve mostly in cities have a totally different mobile experience from those who revolve largely in the countryside. In much of the UK you have to go outside into the garden to get a mobile signal… Remember our house? 
If every phone user had the “UK countryside” experience, the whole smartphone business would be dead. You would buy a [insert your favourite phone] and fall over backwards laughing. No single network stands out, though if one was to make a general statement, perhaps Voda and O2 would be the least crappy of them.
And I don’t think this is a UK-only thing. I recall the same thing from rural France. It’s just that when we pilots travel, we rarely end up in the middle of nowhere. So the debates tend to boil down to whether you stayed in a €50 hotel (crap wifi) or in a €250 hotel (great wifi).
you get a SMS PDQ tell you to stop!
Was this on an Iphone? On IOS, the phone uses a different APN when tethering, so it directly tells the network you are doing it Android doesn’t AFAIK do that, but I could well be wrong because since the wifi / bluetooth tether functionality is a part of the O/S, the phone easily could do the same thing. Nokia struggled with this, especially in the USA, in the face of the phone shops which obviously wanted it blocked (or charge more for it) so people had to hack the phones.
Again, whether this matters depends on whether you can do everything with just your phone. Some people can, some can’t, and there is probably not much overlap between the two populations.
If every phone user had the “UK countryside” experience, the whole smartphone business would be dead.
Now, THAT I would agree with! And yes, I do remember standing at the end of the driveway 
! Sadly, it’s the same in every country I’ve been to.
Was this on an Iphone?
Yes. Same I use here in the US (it’s a non-contract UK version), but here it’s with an ATT SIM, which does allow tethering.
When talking about tethering…if you got a Three PAYG sim with 25 GB of data, it can be used in the USA. However if I inserted this into a 4G hotspot, would it work?
I did a bit of googling on this and found this discussion which has a great deal of plausible stuff in it, including specific user reports.
However if I inserted this into a 4G hotspot, would it work?
Nobody can tell till you try it.
In general, and I have been doing this for years, a “phone” SIM does work in the hotspot devices. The drawback might be that the data costs can be a lot higher than with a data-only SIM, but you know that…
You may need to manually config the APN. I have an E586E and have to do it with just about every SIM.
Revisiting this 2 years later… more on the original EU decision is here.
However I see nothing of the points mentioned say in post #4. How is this handled? What are the time limits on your travel?
EDIT: found some detail here
I can also see there is a raft of other ways they can get you when you are abroad. Throttling the bandwidth is obviously not illegal and easily implemented because the cellular company’s base controls the packet latency.
Interesting, but these restrisction do not seem to apply to my German Vodafone contract … (have to check again). ,
I just bought my two kids new contracts and now they get 6 GB of mobile data for the whole EU and with 42 Mbit/s. Cost is € 25 / month flat with all phone and SMS included.
Throttling the bandwidth is obviously not illegal and easily implemented because the cellular company’s base controls the packet latency.
Throttling isn’t allowed unless you would be throttled at home in the same circumstances. They can’t throttle you abroad if they wouldn’t have throttled you at home.
The biggest catch is that many (pretty much all here) limit the amount of data that you can use abroad. They are restricted on how much they can restrict it, but they all restrict it to the bare minimum that they are allowed to do. For most, it’s plenty, but you probably still shouldn’t be backing up your photos and streaming large amounts of video.
The minimum that they have to allow is the lower of:
a) Your data at home
b) Your monthly bill net of VAT divided by 7.7 and multiplied by 2 (answer is in GB).
The 7.7 gets smaller again next year and keeps getting smaller until 2022.
There is no restriction on calls or texts. What you have a home has to be given in the EU.
One nice advantage is that when you are roaming, calls to other EU countries come out of your bundle as if they were domestic. So if you’re in France and call a local cab, it comes out of your domestic bundle, even though it would not have done so if you called the same number from home.
Just checked: My German Vodafone contract says: If I am abroad more than 4 months a certain additional fee “could” apply but that they would sned me an SMS two weeks before that actually happens.
Good enough for me …
these restrisction do not seem to apply to my German Vodafone contract
They must limit it otherwise all of the EU, except possibly Germany, will be applying for a German SIM card….
Not sure I would do so even if it worked because for ~£15 (SIM free) I get 5GB of which 2GB is roaming, and that is a lot less than €25 for which I would expect to get a decent phone thrown in. And Vodafone is a “top notch” outfit in performance terms, with absolutely no blocking of e.g. tethering or VOIP. Well, VOIP gets de facto blocked by packet latency on 4G although this may vary by the VOIP provider as their prices vary.
Edit: just seen your update. Not unexpected…
Mind the Swiss guys.
What happened here (CZ) is that it is pretty nice I can use my Vodafone 10GB plan anywhere in EU+ EEA countries but Switzerland was somehow moved to these countries like Papua-New Guinea and they will charge me same money for 1MB (something around 10 EUR per 1 MB or anything ridiculous like that)
