August 5, 2007
Time to hang up on roaming campaign?
And the EU’s mobile phone roaming debate goes on…and on…
Brussels recently revealed its “name and shame” website. This shows whether telecoms companies are slashing the cost of international phone use, as demanded under a controversial new EU law.
By and large, it shows that they are. Big deal? Not really, given the spotlight they are under.
A few thoughts:
- Are operators raising text message prices to make up for the lost revenues?
- The law introduced a maximum price that companies can charge customers to make and receive calls while roaming in the EU. This has produced differing results. In Italy, for example, every operator is offering the same, maximum tariff, i.e. no choice. By contrast, in the UK there is a wide range of prices.
- Yes, the EU helped its citizens by forcing down "rip off " fees. But it is starting to look a bit self-serving to go on about this law. Remember that it failed to get the price cuts in place for the peak of the summer holiday season. Operators don’t have to lower their charges until the end of August.
Err I would hardly call the UK a wide range of prices - by that you mean 3 offer a lot less and all the others offer the limit or nearly the limit. If you look down the make call + receive call tariff columns it shows that almost every operator in the EU have 49 / 24 (ie the maximum). Where is the Commission’s promised level of competition below the maximum line? What is the likelihood that this’ll stay like this for the next X years as operators aim to keep prices at their highest level possible…
Posted by: John Middleton | August 6th, 2007 at 8:46 am | Report this commentWhere’s the shame shown by the EC???? All the operators met the deadlines (more or less). The reason is that they are still getting insane profits. For instance roarming on data (through 3G traffic) is charged at minimum for 0.5€ for 100KB. In todays digital world with video, huge attachements, etc, that’s around 15€ each time I check my mail on roarming, easily several hundreds if you travel through Europe twice a month… A price that is certainly not reflecting the costs… They should do s’thing about it…
Posted by: David | August 9th, 2007 at 9:17 am | Report this comment