The EU decides a lot of what happens in Norway, and this summer there was news that was bad for many Norwegian mobile customers.
It was then proven that the European Union’s net neutrality rules stood in the way of the “Freedom of Music” mobile phone service. This is a service where the data traffic used by music streaming services like Spotify and Tidal does not “count” towards the data usage included with your subscription.
Also read: EU puts its foot down: Telenor and Telia must stop mobile service for music
The service was a particularly popular mobile subscription designed for children and young adults.
Large amounts of data escaped from the counter
The rules led both Telenor and Telia to stop selling the service almost immediately, while those who already had it were allowed to keep it for a bit longer.
When streaming music at Spotify’s highest quality, up to 150MB of data is used per hour. If you listen to music for an hour each day, that’s about 4.5GB over the course of a month.
This is 50 percent more than what is currently listed The cheapest Telia subscription to NOK 249 per month.
Now it will be the end of the last
But now it’s over, too, for the last customers to sign up. Telenor cut off service earlier this fall, and now Telia is following suit.
In a physical message sent to customers, Telia announces that the service has finally ended. On December 16th, it finally ended.
– It is true that we are now stopping the freedom of music as a result of the new EU rules. This means that starting December 16th, our customers must use the amount of included data they have to stream music. As a plaster on the wound, we offer to customers who got the service for free in their extra subscription data, says Daniel Barhom of Telia to Nettavisen.
They also encourage customers to check out subscriptions with unlimited data. It’s a much more expensive deal than “regular” subscriptions.
It is revealed in the letter that customers will instead get one gigabyte of additional data package per month, which must be activated via the app. This corresponds to just under 7 hours of broadcasting.
“Now I’ll either upgrade to a more expensive subscription for my son, or it will mean a limited number of songs in playlists have to be downloaded when you’re on the wireless network at home,” a frustrated father tells Nettavisen.
Also read: Test: Apple iPhone 14 Plus – a more important mobile phone than we thought
“Explorer. Unapologetic entrepreneur. Alcohol fanatic. Certified writer. Wannabe tv evangelist. Twitter fanatic. Student. Web scholar. Travel buff.”
