According to the draft legislative proposal, roaming price ceilings which are already in place for mobile telecoms operators will be significantly lowered for voice roaming and SMS. New caps will also be introduced for the first time on retail data roaming, meaning that operators will be forced to set a limit on prices charged to consumers for surfing the Internet abroad from a mobile device.
The proposal is set to be tabled by June after a meeting of the 27-strong EU college of commissioners. Roaming decoupling
In her bid to create price parity between roaming and domestic mobile prices, the EU commissioner in charge of the dossier, Neelie Kroes, is also proposing to allow customers to "opt for an alternative roaming provider" while keeping their mobile number.
A new chapter of the regulation is dedicated to "separation of roaming services". This could favour access to the market of new "virtual operators" specialised in offering roaming packages, as an alternative to traditional telecoms operators, the Commission argues.
The group of national telecoms regulators, BEREC, will have three months to develop guidelines on separation of roaming services. The increased competition which is expected from the move is aimed at driving roaming prices to the same level as domestic prices, virtually ending the extra fees charged for roaming.
But it remains to be seen how user-friendly the model will be. Consumers could indeed find it difficult to switch operators and may not benefit from the potential offered by this new sort of number portability, an industry source told EurActiv. New caps
This target will also be pursued by further tightening the existing caps on prices for mobile telecoms services used abroad. Outgoing voice communications, which are currently capped at €39 cents per minute, will be capped at €24 cents per minute on July 2014. The ceiling will remain in force until July 2016, when the commission considers that caps will no longer be needed.
Fees for receiving calls abroad will also go down, but they will not disappear. Text messages will be capped at €10 cents per SMS until July 2016, compared to the current ceiling of €11 cents.
A cap will also be placed on data roaming with a per kilobyte charge. At the moment consumers are informed when their bill for data roaming reaches €50 per month, in order to avoid the kind of bill shocks that some tourists have experienced in past years.
Wholesale prices which operators pay each other when their customers use other networks while abroad will also be slashed by further lowering the caps already in force. According to the draft proposal, wholesale voice, text messaging and data caps will remain in force until 2022 with a review in 2018. Maintaining wholesale prices low is expected to give operators higher margins on the final prices charged to consumers, argues the Commission.
The new draft regulation has to be approved by the college of the commissioners, and then will have to pass the scrutiny of the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers.
