The EU commissioner in charge of telecommunications, Neelie Kroes, is expected to announce a new roaming regulation on Wednesday (6 July) after receiving the green light from the College of Commissioners the day before.
The move comes immediately after the entry into force of the last phase of the existing roaming regulation, which further lowered prices of voice and SMS roaming as of 1 July.
Brussels intends to replace the current rules, which expire in June 2012, with lower price caps that will apply until 2016.
By then, the Commission expects to have reached its objective of levelling domestic and cross-border mobile phone prices.
New caps
The new caps, already announced by EurActiv in May, will bring prices of international phone calls down to a maximum of €24 cents per minute in July 2014. The move will be made in two steps – in 2012 and 2013.
€24 cents per minute is the price paid in most EU countries to make domestic mobile phone calls. Roaming prices are currently capped at €35 cents per minute under the existing EU regulation.
Under the existing regulation, receiving phone calls abroad will cost a maximum of €10 cents per minute in July 2013, down from the current €11 cents. SMS prices will also go down to a maximum of €10 cents in July 2012, compared to the current ceiling of €11 cents.
With the new regulation, unprecedented caps are now also set to be imposed on data roaming – the fees which apply when customers surf the Internet while abroad. Currently, clients are kept informed of their data-roaming consumption when their bill reaches €50 per month. This was imposed by the Commission in order to avoid the kind of bill shocks that some tourists have experienced in the past.
However, there was no ceiling imposed on data roaming. With the new rules in place, data roaming will be capped as of July 2012 and will not cost more than €90 cents per megabyte. In July 2014, this ceiling is set to further decrease to €50 cents per megabyte. All prices exclude value added tax (VAT).
Roaming separation and virtual operators
In addition, the new proposed rules introduce innovative ways to structurally reform the supply of mobile services by forcing operators to make a distinction between roaming and domestic services.
There are also measures to enable new "virtual" operators to enter the market. In her bid to level prices between domestic calls and roaming, the EU commissioner responsible for telecoms, Neelie Kroes, wants to enable customers to opt for an alternative roaming provider while keeping their mobile number.
"Providers shall enable their subscribers to access the voice, SMS and data roaming services of any interconnected alternative roaming provider," reads the regulation, obtained by EurActiv.
Moreover, "any switch to or from an alternative roaming provider shall be free of charge and shall not entail conditions or restrictions," adds the document in a paragraph entitled 'Separation of roaming services'.
When the caps expire in 2016, competition between operators is expected to keep prices low, like in all non-regulated markets. That is why increasing the number of operators, and thus competition, is seen by Brussels as a priority.
In order to boost competition, the new regulation proposes to slash the wholesale prices that operators pay to use each other's networks. By slashing these prices and removing other barriers, the Commission wants to favour the emergence of new operators, specialised exclusively in the sale of roaming services.
"At present there are obstacles to the access to such wholesale roaming services, due to differences in negotiating power and in the degree of infrastructure ownership of undertakings," explains the new regulation.
"The removal of these obstacles would facilitate the development of alternative and innovative roaming services and offers for customers, in particular from virtual network operators. It would also facilitate the development of pan-European services," Brussels argues.
However, it remains to be seen how user-friendly this new model will be.
Consumers may find it difficult to switch operators and may not benefit from the potential offered by this new sort of number portability.
The new regulation will have to pass the scrutiny of the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers before it can be applied across the EU.
