EU formally adopts caps on cross-border mobile roaming rates
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The European Union on Monday formally adopted rules slashing the cost of cross border mobile phone calls in the 27-nation bloc, paving the way for their application in the coming months.
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Operators say operators should set prices Mobile World Congress EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has warned mobile executives in Barcelona today that she will impose caps on roaming charges for data and text messaging if they do not cut prices by 1 July.â¦
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British watchdog inflates costs The European Commission says British regulator Ofcom is having a negative effect on mobile rates in the UK. The EC and national regulators are meant to be working together to bring down mobile costs.â¦
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Cell phone giant Vodafone Group PLC, which has spent years struggling to recoup billions spent on 3G licences, finally launched the cutting-edge service Wednesday in much of Europe and introduced or beefed up its operation in a dozen other countries.
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Wi-Fi hotspot owners BT Openzone, Singapore&#39;s StarHub, Malaysia&#39;s maxis, Japan&#39;s NTT Com, T-Mobile, Australia&#39;s Telstra and Telecom Italia have entered into a broad roaming agreement to allow each company&#39;s customers to access the others&#39; networks.
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Plans to limit mobile phone call costs for consumers who travel abroad within Europe are attacked by the industry.
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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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Tele2  said on Monday it  signed a roaming agreement for access to T-Mobile's mobile  network in Croatia.
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African mobile phone operator Celtel has increased the number of nations where roaming charges do not apply.
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BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The European Commission said Wednesday it had dropped its antitrust investigation into mobile phone roaming prices charged by operators in Britain and Germany after new EU rules forcing telecom companies to cut the cost of using mobile phones abroad.
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After forcing Europe's mobile  operators to cut rates for making and receiving phone calls  abroad, the European Union's top telecoms regulator has set her  sights on prices for downloading and surfing the Web  wirelessly.
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Investor's Business Daily - Investors in European telecom stocks have worried about rumors the EU soon would cap roaming charges on cell phone calls, hurting profits. That is until new rumors surfaced about possible mergers.
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Just buy a license, and do what you will The EU has released a policy document calling for frequencies to be allocated with no restriction put on what they can be used for.â¦
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Mobile communications operators and banks joined forces on Monday to make it easier and cheaper for hundreds of millions of immigrants and migrant workers to send money home by using their mobile phones.
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Jens F. Laurson and George A. Pieler explain why cell phone roaming charges in Europe remain stuck in the stratosphere.
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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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European Union ministers adopted on  Thursday rules that will slash the price of making mobile phone  calls abroad in the 27-member bloc, after a year of wrangling  and heated debate, the EU's German presidency said.