Mobile data will no longer charge roaming fees? You may even spend more money because of it

Starting from July 1, the mobile data roaming charges that have long been an "industry practice" have finally been officially cancelled, and all provincial data traffic of the three major operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, will be automatically upgraded to domestic data traffic (excluding data traffic in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan).

I believe that many friends have already discovered that the original subscribed provincial traffic has all been automatically upgraded to national traffic. This change does provide convenience for consumers to a certain extent.

Take me as an example. The 500MB of intra-province traffic that I subscribed to Wojia Manager has now become national traffic. Last month, I happened to be on a business trip outside the province for half a month, so the 500MB of traffic from Wojia Manager was not used at all. Instead, I used up all the national traffic and had to buy additional traffic packages. If this policy had been implemented a month earlier, I could have saved this money.

But why do we say to a certain extent? That is because the users who really benefit from this policy are not the main users, but only those who often travel outside the province. It can be said that the scope is not large among all mobile phone users. Therefore, the number of consumers benefited is far less than the previous cancellation of long-distance charges.

And it should be made clear that only long-term subscriptions to intra-province data services will be affected by this policy, such as those described in mobile phone packages or long-term subscription services such as Wojia General Manager, which is valid until 2050. If it is only a short-term data package such as a daily package or a monthly package, the actual impact will only be one month, because the new standard will be applied next month.

Some netizens may ask, no matter how many people can benefit, operators will always reduce a large part of their revenue by doing this. What do you think about this? In fact, this is not necessarily the case.

First, operators can make up for the losses through other means. Take Beijing Unicom as an example. The original traffic package purchase was divided into two types: provincial package and national package, and the prices of the two were different. For example, the 100 yuan provincial monthly package has 5G traffic, while the 100 yuan national monthly package only has 3G traffic. But now the provincial package has been cancelled, leaving only the 100 yuan 3G national package available for purchase.

You know, there are only a few people who often travel outside the province, and the vast majority of people who buy data packages will choose packages within the province. But now that the provincial packages have been cancelled, it means that everyone can only buy the relatively uncost-effective national packages, which actually makes more money than before.

There is also a 7-day package for 20 yuan that I bought during a business trip last month. It includes 7G of intra-province traffic and 7G of national traffic. According to the new policy, it should be adjusted to 14G of national traffic, but now this package is directly cancelled. Therefore, operators always know better than consumers.

Secondly, the revenue structure of operators is also gradually changing, shifting from To C business to To B business. Enterprises will become the main customers of operators in the future, and this part of revenue will not be affected by such fee reduction policies. Therefore, we can foresee that further reduction of tariffs in the future is inevitable. The country has also set such a goal, and operators are also happy to do so.

With the advent of the 5G era, operators' business models will become more diversified, and consumers' daily mobile charges will be further reduced, but at the same time, operators' revenues will continue to grow. New demands and new traffic usage patterns will emerge in the 5G era, so we should not think that operators will suffer losses.

So to sum up, who can actually benefit from this new policy? In fact, only consumers who travel frequently and have subscribed to long-term provincial data services before, so there are actually very few people who meet the conditions. Most people may even spend more money because of this.