Why you shouldn't be paying more than £9 a month for your mobile

Mobile users elsewhere in Europe will see the complete removal next summer of so-called roaming charges across the continent. These are the fees levied when a phone connects to a foreign operator, and are over and above your normal call charges.

They are being done away with under an EU regulation, though whether Britain will still be party to it remains to be seen. But even if not, you can save enough on your mobile bill between now and then to more than offset the difference.

Changing not just your tariff but also your mobile operator can now be accomplished with one simple call, and you should consider it whenever your contract is up for renewal. You keep your existing phone number and your existing handset, if you wish.

As I mentioned last week, handsets have fallen in price to such an extent that it’s no longer necessary to lease them from one of the big operators. £150 cash will buy you a really good model not locked to any network; simply pop in the SIM card of your choice and start dialing.

Your existing handset may also be capable of taking a different SIM card - but if you got it from Vodafone, O2, Virgin or EE it may well need unlocking first. O2 will do this free for pay-monthly customers; otherwise, a charge of up to £15 may apply. However, if you have an old model, it’s worth looking online for a free code that will do the job.

The number of operators vying to supply your new SIM has increased exponentially these last few years, and a slew of unfamiliar names has emerged. Tello, the most recent of these, is the UK offshoot of an American company and the first over here to let you specify your own combination of monthly minutes, texts and data.

Like most of its rivals, Tello specialises in monthly bundles, a hybrid of the old pay-monthly and pay-as-you-go models, whereby a monthly fee gets you a specified allowance. This expires at the end of the month whether you’ve used it or not, but for all but the most occasional users it works out cheaper than paying and topping-up as you go.

£9 is now the monthly benchmark figure for an average user, making several calls a week and using mobile internet regularly though not excessively. For this, Tello gives you 200 minutes of calls, unlimited texts and a gigabyte of 4G data - that’s roughly comparable with £10 packages from Asda Mobile and Giffgaff, though Asda doesn’t offer 4G connectivity.

The downside to Tello is that it piggybacks on the Three network, whose mobile coverage is less comprehensive than others - so be sure to check your area before you sign up. Roaming abroad post-Brexit will make no difference with Tello because it’s not available anyway. You can use wifi to make calls from other countries, via an app, but you can’t receive any. Tello does, however, let you use your phone’s mobile signal to supply wi-fi to nearby devices - a process known as tethering, which many operators prohibit.

All of which means that, no matter what happens in Europe next summer, if you’re paying more than £9 or £10 a month for your out-of-contract phone, you’re paying too much.