Commissioner calls time on roaming charges

Neelie Kroes wants mobile operators to scrap roaming charges for EU to be a truly competitive single market

Neelie Kroes "not afraid to propose necessary measures" for EU to become a competitive single market

Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital agenda, has called for the EU Commission's review of roaming regulation to tackle the issue of mobile operators charging vastly inflated rates for international phone calls.

She said this is necessary in order to promote a truly competitive single market for all aspects of telecoms services in Europe.

Acting Minister for Enterprise and Streamlining Policy Vincent Van Quickenborne and Austrian MEP Paul Rubig recently both declared their support for banning roaming charges outright within Europe on 4G mobile networks.

Van Quickenborne noted that mobile downloading abroad costs a Belgian subscriber almost 30 times more than it does at home.

“I think we can all agree that such pricing examples bear little relation to the true cost of supplying the service,” said Kroes.

“For me a true digital market is one in which effective competition ensures that citizens, customers and businesses do not experience substantially different services or costs when they pass a border,” she added.

She also said that a true single market is one where the price differences between voice, SMS and data relate only to the actual cost of providing these different services.

“In the future, when all transmission in networks is data, the prices for different services should logically converge. In such a market, costs will indeed go down, but the opportunities for innovation and new business models will grow.”

Kroes added that she has set the achievement of a true single market for telecoms as a key objective of her Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE).

“I will assess the structural, economic and legal barriers to such a true single market and I am not afraid to propose the necessary measures to overcome these. But some out-of-the-box thinking is needed for that.

“I want the gap between roaming and domestic prices to approach zero, and the sooner, the better.”