From a business perspective, it’s easy to feel jittery about Brexit, even if your business is not actually headquartered in the United Kingdom. You might have staff who are based in satellite offices in the country or regularly embark on corporate trips on British soil.

For those people, it isn’t reassuring that, at the time of writing, the UK has not yet struck a deal with the EU that would provide certainty regarding calling from the UK post-Brexit. Everything remains up in the air, but here are a few example scenarios of what could occur…

What if a Brexit deal does materialise?

It isn’t inescapable that the UK could settle on a deal that lets it preserve EU laws for a two-year grace period after the UK technically departs the bloc. Those laws include the ruling regarding EU roaming charges – a ruling that came into effect in June 2017, as the Mirror reported at the time.

This law meant that people with UK phone deals could take their phones with them to other EU member states and call back home without having to pay more than they would have done for calls within the UK. The ruling was also convenient for people visiting the UK from elsewhere in the EU…

For example, if your firm’s head office is based in France or Germany, employees of your company resident in these countries might have grown accustomed to averting prohibitive roaming fees when paying occasional visits to the UK, such as to meet up with fellow staffers in satellite offices there.

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If the UK does succeed in formalising an exit deal with the EU, your staff should still be able to enjoy that particular financial perk until at least 2021, Lonely Planet clarifies. That would give you time to reconsider your arrangements if you are worried about what could change after the cut-off point.

Could a “no deal” Brexit throw you into financial chaos?

Without a deal in place, it remains unclear what shape, if any, roaming charges will take after Brexit. The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport has, as noted by Which?, proposed a statutory instrument aimed at letting UK mobile providers axe free, EU-based roaming if they wish.

Furthermore, if your firm’s staff currently subscribe to EU mobile networks outside the UK, they would need to pay roaming fees again while in the UK. However, if your staff regularly visit the UK from outside the EU, they might already be very familiar with high charges for international calls…

Can you reduce the cost of international calls from the UK?

It isn’t unusual to need to pay over £1 a minute to call people located in the United States or Australia, to cite two examples. This can add up to extortionate call costs for your workers during their UK stays, but they could still benefit from comparatively cheap international calls…

They could, for example, register an online prepay account with Planet Numbers, allowing call costs to be slashed to a penny per minute.