UK Government tried to stop EU roaming cap
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Just looking after their mates Documents exposed by The Times show that the UK's Labour government worked tirelessly to try and prevent the EU capping mobile phone roaming rates, a move which cost the industry millions.â¦
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Proposed law could prevent the government from offering broadband access.
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EU governments yesterday agreed to cut the cost of using mobile phones abroad, the last hurdle for a cap on roaming fees to be introduced later this summer.
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The British government is trying to move on to look beyond the new EU treaty in an attempt to undermine arguments for a referendum, says the BBC's Paul Reynolds
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The European Commission has given mobile network operators until July 1 to cut the cost of using mobile data services while traveling abroad or face regulation.
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(InfoWorld) - While mobile operators claim to be cutting the cost of roaming, their efforts are just a smoke screen and have no appreciable effect on charges overall, a European consumer rights group has said. The lower tariffs are typically available for a limited duration, sometimes requiring payment of an additional subscription fee, and may only be cheaper for long calls made using certain networks, BEUC, the European Consumers' Organisation, said on Tuesday. The fees should be capped at â¬0.33 ($0.43) per minute for customers roaming outside their home country, consumer groups said . Their demand is considerably lower than the cap of â¬0.49 per minuteÂ proposed by the European CommissionÂ in draft legislation that could be voted by June. Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media,Â announced plans last FebruaryÂ to crack down on mobile phone roaming charges, which she said were unreasonably high. On July 12, the Commission proposed cutting by 70 percent the cost of making and receiving calls while travelling in another European Union member state, saving European consumers â¬5 billion a year, according to the Commission's figures. Under the Commission's proposal, operators will be allowed to charge no more than â¬0.16 per minute for calls received while travelling abroad, â¬0.33 per minute for calls made within the country being visited, or â¬0.49 per minute for calls made back home or to a third country while abroad. However, that's still too much for the consumer groups, which called for charges of â¬0.16, â¬0.25 and 0.33 per minute, respectively. The French Consumers' Union (UFC - Que Choisir) called for national telecommunications regulators to collect more information about the volume of incoming, outgoing and local roaming calls, and the wholesale prices charged by operators for each type of call. Without such statistics, it's difficult to measure the effects of tariffs and policies, the group said. Regulators and consumers are dependent on figures provided by the GSM Association, which represents 700 mobile phone operators, the French group said. Those figures showed that the cost of making roaming calls in Europe fell by 25 percent in 2006, from â¬0.83 per minute to â¬0.62, the GSM Association said on Feb. 8. The price decline shows that regulation, especially of the retail market, is unnecessary, the Association said. In the absence of independent measurements of the market, BEUC and UFC - Que Choisir commissioned their own economic analysis in order to determine what they consider fair price caps. Limiting charges to â¬0.33 per minute will stimulate demand, and so have no adverse effect on operators' revenue or profit, they said. Based on mobile phone bills supplied by Members of the European Parliament, they calculated that lower charges could save MEPs an average over â¬1,000 each per year. European telecommunications ministers are expected to discuss the Commission's proposed regulations at informal meetings alongside the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, next month, while the European Parliament will vote on the proposals in April. Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has announced its intention to push the legislation on roaming prices through by the end of June, when its term of office ends. Â
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Apple's iTunes is referred to the European Commission on the grounds that it over-charges UK customers.
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The amount consumers are charged for making mobile phone calls while abroad is to be investigated by EU regulators.
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Ofcom deregulation plan a goer thanks to unbundling European regulators have backed a move by Ofcom to drop regulations that force BT to offer competitors price-capped wholesale broadband nationwide.â¦
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A broadband provider prevented customers from using its service, company says.
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BARCELONA, Spain  - Mobile phone operators must  act before July 1 to avoid the European Union imposing lower  prices for texting or surfing the Web via mobile phones when  abroad, the bloc's top telecoms regulator said on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Union's 27 governments gave the final OK Thursday to a law that will slash the cost of using a mobile phone abroad by around 70 percent, the German government said. By the end of this month mobile phone operators will have to offer subscribers a capped rate for phoning or receiving calls while outside their own countries. In the first year, roaming tariffs will be capped at â¬0.49 ($0.66) a minute for making calls abroad and â¬0.24 for receiving them. It will fall to â¬0.46 and â¬0.22 in the second year and â¬0.43 and â¬0.19 in the third, respectively. A rear-guard action by the U.K. in defense of mobile phone operators petered out and British Industry Minister Margaret Hodge was convinced to support theÂ compromise packageÂ put forward by the European Parliament. Mobile phone operators haveÂ lobbied hard to avert the law, which they see as unnecessary and harmful to competition. German Economy Minister Michael Glos was chairing the meeting because Germany currently holds the six-month rotating presidency of the EU. He will announce the agreement reached Thursday morning at a press conference at 3 p.m. CET (1 p.m. GMT). Â
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Accused of 'twisting the truth' Mobile operators have been accused of "twisting the truth" by a major European consumer lobby group investigating roaming charges.â¦
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Telecoms watchdog Ofcom yesterday tried to relax BT&#39;s hold on the nation&#39;s network of phone lines by ordering a reduction of more than 70% in the price the company can charge its rivals to use them.
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Vodafone, O2, and T-Mobile escape anti-trust fines Vodafone, O2, and T-Mobile will likely breathe a sigh of relief today after European Union anti-trust authorities decided to close their long-running investigation into alleged excessive charges for international calls.â¦
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Stop the mobile data madness We are indebted to The Mirror for the latest example of mobile data charging madness, this time in England.â¦
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Europeans are paying high prices to send cell-phone text messages or use mobile Internet services outside their own country, the EU's telecoms chief said Thursday, just months after the EU capped roaming charges for calls.