Background:
International roaming occurs in the following instances:
- When a mobile-phone user calls home from abroad, using the network of a foreign operator, his own operator pays a fee to the foreign operator. This wholesale fee is calculated by the phone-user's provider and charged to the user, who pays the normal national phone charge plus this 'roaming charge'.
- When a mobile-phone user abroad receives a call from home, the receiving party also has to pay a roaming fee. The caller (who may not know that the person he is calling is abroad) only pays the national phone charge.
- When a mobile-phone user abroad calls a local number there, the call is passed on to the country where his phone is registered and then back again, entailing a roaming charge plus the higher cost of an international call.
- When two travellers abroad speak to each other on GSMs, both pay roaming charges. In addition, the calling party pays the charge for an international phone call.
In the past, high wholesale prices for roaming and profit margins have led to prices for international mobile phone calls that Informaion Society Commissioner Viviane Reding considers "not acceptable". In October 2005, the Commission found that some telecom operators charge up to 20 times the cost of a domestic phone call for cross-border calls. In November 2006, at a time when operators claimed that roaming costs had been brought down by 22%, the Commission found that:
- On average, roaming prices are still 4 times higher than national mobile calls;
- in some cases, roaming prices can exceed €12 for a four-minute roamed call abroad, and;
- 70% of EU citizens believe that the EU should regulate to bring mobile prices down.
A recent Eurobarometer found that, in order to avoid high costs, 15% of mobile-phone users in the EU either leave their mobile phone at home or switch it off when travelling abroad. An additional 21% use only text message services (such as SMS) when in another EU country. 63% of respondents said that they use their mobile phone less often abroad than at home. Around 150 million Europeans use their cell phone in a different EU country each year; three quarters of those are on business trips, the rest tourists.
The Commission proposed, for those reasons, on 12 July 2006, a draft new regulation on international roaming, which proposes to cap the wholesale price on mobile- roaming services and allow no more than 30% to be passed on to the customer. The resulting retail price caps would currently be:
- 33 euro cent for local calls (to an operator within the host country);
- 49 cent per minute for international calls (to an operator in a country other than the host country), and;
- 16.5 cent per minute for receiving a call abroad.
