Europeans returning from trips to neighbouring countries often experience unpleasant surprises when looking at their mobile phone bills - telecom operators charge up to 20 times the cost of a domestic phone call for cross-border calls. Often, users are not aware of the extremely high costs this can involve, and in many cases it is difficult to get reliable information on the costs one is facing when using a mobile phone in a different EU country. The result is that private persons and companies feel discouraged from using their cell phones when travelling, which is bad for citizens, bad for businesses and in the last instance even bad for the competitiveness of the telecom industry.
In order to create more competition between operators in the field of international roaming charges, the Commission launched, on 4 October 2004, a website providing all the information the Commission could obtain on the costs of a standardised call between EU countries using different operators and roaming partners. As for now, the site features only information already available on the operators' websites, and it is available only in English.
Positions
"Every service must of course have a price," Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding writes in an article for the media, "but the European Commission cannot tolerate unjustifiably high prices. I will continue to work together with the European Parliament, consumer organisations and the industry on international mobile roaming charges. The new website will be updated six months from now. I expect to see substantial progress in the market by then."
Jim Murray, Director of BEUC, the European consumer's organisation, said: “We welcome the Commission’s initiative as a first step in the right direction. Unfortunately the website is only providing a sample of roaming tariffs, and the content is still quite limited. Consumers should not have to start comparing uncomparable fees, changing operators or buy new sim cards and all these kinds of advices each time they travel. More competition is still very much needed in this sector. It is high time to oblige operators to provide the transparent information on all tariffs that consumers need and deserve.”
GSM Europe, the European Interest Group of the GSM Association says that it fully supports the web site launched by the Commission and points to the voluntary code of conduct on roaming tariff transparency it adopted in 2001. "The Commission have, nevertheless, identified a need for an additional, independent source of tariff information and have sought to satisfy that need", a spokesperson said. "We welcome their initiative." GSME Chairman Kaisu Karvala added: "It is however very important that such information is easily understood and always accurate and up to date. Credibility and trust are at stake for anyone providing or administering such information or site."
