The muppets disabled roaming somehow… But a few days ago, after the debacle in France, re enabled it, but only on my backup phone.
And how many carry a backup phone?
Of course you can’t test it while at home…
Also it looks like Vodafone disable the online chat feature with a phone client unless the connection uses the Vodafone SIM itself. Go figure…
Also it looks like the claim that the setting applies to the whole account (which may have multiple SIMs on it) is not true.
This guy gave me some bull that the roaming may get disabled if you have not used it for a while. Well, there may be some inadvertent truth in this. The EU’s roaming regulation has forced cellular companies to reconfigure all their accounts, and inevitably a lot of them got screwed up totally. I was connecting to Vodafone Germany, which is technically “roaming”.
I posted the above screenshot to help anyone track this down.
I’m pretty sure this is fallout from the EU abolishing roaming charges. I am on Three (UK) for my Euro phone and I know that their roaming settings have changed. Mine works here in the US (sometimes – rarely – use it to call the UK), but there seems to be some sort of formula that mixes time abroad vs. spend abroad vs spend in UK vs time in UK to determine if you can continue roaming. The reasoning behind this of course being to prevent people from getting a phone in a ‘cheap’ country and then using it in an ‘expensive’ country w/o incurring roaming charges. As the implementation of this most likely is rather complex in the background, I suspect these EU roaming issues to persists for some time. The law of unintended consequences strikes again….
No such games with German SIM cards. One of the best things the EU ever did for the common people. Huge quality of life improvement for me. My carrier even added Switzerland for free.
I have also had no problems at all since the change in roaming also with Vodafone UK.
Vodafone cover Switzerland, Norway and IIRC Turkey too, as “Europe”.
This roaming issue appears to be an account misconfiguration thing which happened to many people, at random.
When I had 5GB UK of which 2GB was roaming, I never had any problem. The problems started only when it became 5GB UK of which 100% was roaming.
Peter wrote:
This roaming issue appears to be an account misconfiguration thing which happened to many people, at random.
Yes but you are a bit of a Murphy’s Law magnet Peter. Things just seem to happen to you. 
Vodafone is a disaster if things go wrong though. I had a misconfigured sim card that took them weeks to fix and no matter how much and how loudly I complained they didn’t do anything fast.
Peter wrote:
The problems started only when it became 5GB UK of which 100% was roaming.
Are you saying you’ve used this SIM exclusively outside the UK? If so, see my earlier post.
No; mostly in the UK (it is my main phone) but it was discovered to not work on all trips (within the past few months) outside the UK. My backup phone (which I carry on all trips) has another Voda contract SIM and that also didn’t work, but after a lengthy online chat session Voda fixed that one. Today they also fixed the first one.
All cellular outfits are a disaster when something goes wrong; it’s the “drive to the bottom” in today’s consumer IT business – unless you are a corporate customer with say 100 phones and then you get a “very special” call centre. The Voda call centre used to be very competent; I used to call them on a Newbury number until they realised too many people were doing this and then the number got redirected to the Indian script muppet queue… I know they still have it because I kicked up a massive stink when my backup SIM just stopped working one day and they eventually put me through to Newbury where a guy immediately sorted it and sent me a new SIM. FWIW I had far worse experiences with the others i.e. TM, O2, Orange… with the hangers-on (e.g. Life Mobile, with their £5/month contract) being completely atrocious in both service and reliability. I had a SIM in a tablet on Life Mobile (now Plusnet) and when it stopped working one day I just chucked it away.
you are a bit of a Murphy’s Law magnet Peter
Maybe because I exercise these things more than most people However see post(s) above reporting the same. I am probably just someone who hits the keyboard, in the hope that it helps somebody else.
