Small telcos rarely handle these things themselves and instead resell bigger telcos. If anything, I hope this triggers an investment in optimising this infrastructure; if i can use the internet without caring where the physical servers are, so should my phone be.

Sorry, when I said 'small national telco' I meant a telco for a small nation.

If they have no way to recoup the additional cost of all the incoming visitors, then they can't invest in expanding infrastructure.

It's probably a pretty limited scenario though.

Recouping costs is different from charge through the nose for international traffic.

Yesterday, that traffic typically was priced at euros per _mega_byte, starting at the first bit transferred; starting today that's at most €7.70 + VAT per _giga_byte, starting after you have used your (fairly generous) fair use allotment, going down to €2,50 per gigabyte in the coming years.

Naturally, countries who see many tourists heavily opposed this change and lobbied to keep the maximum price that the EU now has set high.