Téléphonie mobile: l’UE ajourne les réduction de tarifs à 2012[en] 

Mobile termination rates are wholesale connection fees that operators charge one another for transmitting phone calls to a competitor's network.

In the EU, every call made to a customer on a different network (i.e. from Base to Proximus in Belgium, or from T-Mobile to E-Plus in Germany) costs the caller's company an average of €8.55 cents. For international phone calls, the fees are higher. These charges are reflected in the final price charged to consumers.

In other developed countries such as the US, termination rates do not exist, but operators directly charge consumers to receive calls.

After fierce lobbying from major telecoms companies and some member states (mainly Germany and Spain), the Commission twice decided to review its original plan, which foresaw cutting termination rates across Europe by the beginning of 2012 (EurActiv 19/02/09). 

The first review came two weeks ago when Brussels proposed a text to member states referring to July 2012 as the new deadline (EurActiv 28/04/09). The final recommendation instead proposes the end of 2012 as the definitive target date for implementing the new measures at national level.

Telecoms operators were thus given an extra year to comply with the proposed changes, which are expected to impact upon their revenues.

"We changed the text because we listened to stakeholders. We don't do top-down politics," said Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, presenting the text together with Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

But big telecom firms complained about "the absence of a thorough impact assessment of the proposed measure," according to ETNO, an association which brings together major European incumbents such as Deutsche Telekom, Belgacom, BT, France Telecom and Telefonica.

The recommendation is aimed at bringing down mobile wholesale rates to the level of fixed charges. This means that the fees one mobile operator can charge another to carry a call will fall from the current EU average of €8.55 cents to between €1.5 cents and €3 cents per minute.

Calculation based on costs

The Commission is pushing for a methodology which is based only on the cost of carrying a phone call. According to the EU executive, mobile operators currently charge rates which have nothing to do with interconnection services, "such as headquarters bills".

Critics of the new measures say that they could lead EU mobile operators to increase other fees or to charge customers to receive calls and not just to make them, as a way of offsetting the expected lost revenue.

On the other hand, Brussels considers that cutting mobile rates will bring "additional revenue for fixed operators of at least €2 billion over the next three years". Since many EU telecoms operators are integrated, offering both mobile and fixed services, they will balance the losses, runs the Commission's argument.

The recommendation is in itself a non-binding legal instrument which national regulators are obliged to take into account, but that will not legally force them to abide by it. "Regulators are decent, realistic people, aware that where there are inconsistent approaches to regulation on mobile rates, [which] is bad for them too," said Kroes, before threatening to use "another instrument" in case of non-compliance.