The European Commission outlined plans to slash the consumer costs for international mobile roaming. Currently, at least 147 million EU citizens are “roaming” on a regular basis and average retail prices for calls made whilst roaming are roughly 4 times higher than the equivalent prices for domestic mobile calls. By EC estimates, operators have been charging prices 300% or 400% higher than the cost of making these calls. At wholesale level, there are no agreed inter-operator tariffs for received calls, so operators could have decreased the prices without the need to change any international agreements.
Proposed regulation would establish a price cap on the charges that one operator applies to another. The regulation also states that the mark-up used to determine retail prices that are actually charged to consumers for making and receiving a call while roaming may not exceed 30%.
Operators would be free to compete beneath the wholesale cap plus retail mark-up ceiling, by charging each other less for carrying calls, reducing their retail mark-up or differentiating the packages of services that they offer according to consumer demand.http://europa.eu.int
