An online crowdfunding campaign has been launched to pay the mobile roaming bill of migrating eagles being tracked the Russian Wild Animal Rehabilitation Team at the Siberian Environmental Centre.

The thirteen tagged Steppe Eagles, being tracked via bi-hourly SMS messages containing GPS coordinates, ran up a hefty data roaming bill after migrating across countries as far afield as Egypt, Georgia and India.

One eagle, named ‘Min’ by researchers, unexpectedly flew from Kazakhstan via Iran, initially losing signal but then sending a backlog of messages at high rates, before crossing into Saudi Arabia and reaching as far South as the Yemen.

At a cost of 7,000 roubles (£85 per day), Min quickly used up the programme’s entire budget for tracking all 13 Eagles, forcing the Russian team of environmentalists to turn to social media for financial support.

Considered endangered by the IUCN, the Steppe Eagle once commonly reached as far afield the Ukraine, but researchers were unprepared for expensive data charges across the Middle East, which can be three-times higher than those in the Russian Federation.

The centre’s crowdfunding campaign has raised more than 250,000 roubles (roughly £3,000), although Russian telecoms provider MegaFon has since agreed to write-off the wayward Eagles’ data roaming bill debt as a gesture of goodwill.

Modern business mobile packages offer in-built policies to support data roaming limits across multiple countries worldwide, and to allow data ‘pooling’ across an entire organisation to offer some protection against any one individual breaking their data limit. Even if you migrate South for the Winter.

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Mobile phone charges for travellers within the EU officially end from today under a new EU Law.

Additional fees levied by mobile providers for cross-border calls (‘roaming’ charges) had been significantly higher – often catching out unsuspecting holidaymakers.

The end of costly EU roaming charges is widely credited as one of the EU’s most popular achievements, ending fees that the commission felt represented one additional cost barrier to cross-border communication. The agreement has not been without difficulties however, and the new regulation has taken 10 years to come into force.

However, as always with the EU, this welcome news for travellers comes with some specific caveats:

• Users will still be charged high fees for data use (at around £8.30/GB, falling incrementally in future years), whilst standard calls and texts will remain at typical network pricing. 
• EU roaming phones will be monitored for time spent on ‘home’ networks and ‘roaming’ networks to discourage phone users taking out a contract in a cheaper country and using it permanently in a more expensive country. If found not to be truly ‘roaming’, extra charges may still apply.
• Call fees will still be higher for international calls made from the customer’s home country.
• Countries in ‘Europe’ but not in the European Economic Area (EEA) will not be included in the agreement (including Switzerland, Serbia and the Channel Islands among others) nor will calls from cross-channel ferries and other satellite-linked areas.
• It’s as yet unclear what will happen after Brexit.

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