EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding is targeting the mobile phone industry once again, with proposals to cut roaming charges for sending text messages by up to 60 per cent.
Ms Reding is planning to cap the charges for sending texts within the EU at 11 cent per message. She told German magazine
Der Spiegelthat the new caps will be in place by next summer.
In the pre-released story, to be published on Sunday, Ms Reding says telephone calls will also have to be billed by the second, to avoid operators charging by the minute even if the call only last a few seconds, and competition for accessing the internet abroad will be increased.
Communications Minister Eamon Ryan welcomed the proposal, citing it as "a fine example of cooperation across countries to work in the consumer's interest".
"Crossing a border within the European Union should not incur unnecessary financial penalties," he said.
Communications regulator Comreg also greeted the proposals positively. "We welcome any initiative that leads to a reduction in the cost of mobile communications and gives consumers better value while roaming," a spokeswoman for the regualtor said.
Some 2.5 billion text messages are sent every year by roaming customers in the EU and cost about 10 times more than domestic SMS.
Roamed texts represented 97 per cent pure revenue for operators, Ms Reding said in July. A roamed text currently costs about 29 cent to send.
The proposal also extends by three years to 2013 caps which are already in place on roamed voice calls but will steepen the rate of decline, the sources said, quoting from the draft text. The cap on the cost of making a roamed voice call fell to 43 cent a minute on August 30th.
"Reducing roaming charges on European calls was a necessary first step, I am pleased that we are moving on to text messages and mobile data services," Mr Ryan said.
"Mobile phones now carry a whole range of applications which is the reason the Government supports the open access of these networks. We need lower call and connection costs to increase the traffic of data on the internet, over mobile phones."
The European Regulators Group, made up of national telecoms watchdogs from each member state, said recently that due to falls in wholesale connection prices, the current caps on roamed voice calls are about 8 cent per minute too high.
The GSM Association, an industry lobby with members such as Vodafone, Orange and Telefonica has previously said there was no case for regulatory intervention in the roamed texts sector and a comprehensive analysis of of price caps on roamed voice calls has yet to be made.
Additional reporting - Reuters
