Europe seeks to save us from death by roaming charges
If you've traveled internationally, you know that airfare is often the cheapest part of the trip. The big ticket item, oddly enough, is often roaming charges. Last year I was hit with a $1,450 bill for fewer than three hours of online time in Canada. Others have been hit with far worse.
It's therefore gratifying to read in Ars Technica that the European Commission, which has taken on Microsoft and others, has turned its attention to the abusive roaming charges that wireless carriers inflict on consumers.
According to the European Commission, citizens are charged an average price of ?0.29 for sending a text message while abroad by carriers like Vodafone and O2....The European Union announced plans in July to challenge what it called the "roaming rip-off," and the proposed caps have been set at a retail price of ?0.11 and wholesale price of ?0.04 for text messages. The proposition is now in the hands of the European Parliament; if the cap is approved, it will go into effect on July 1, 2009.
Other proposed changes include a retail cap of ?1 per roaming megabyte, as well as the introduction of an automated message that informs the user of the roaming data charges....Finally, a cap on roaming voice call prices set in 2007 could be lowered further, as the proposition seeks reduce the current ?0.46 cap on making calls to ?0.34, and the ?0.22 cap on receiving calls to ?0.10. Those changes would be in effect by July 1, 2012.
It can't come soon enough. There doesn't appear to be any credible reason to maintain sky-high roaming charges internationally. Remember when the wireless carriers insisted upon charging exorbitant domestic roaming charges? Funny that they managed to survive once they dumped those. The same should hold true for international roaming charges.
It's time to encourage a free market in mobile by removing, or at least severely limiting, roaming charges. It's good to see the European Commission taking the lead in this.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
An intelligently regulated slightly less free market is what works.
- by toby0905 December 2, 2008 5:28 AM PST
- deepwave - you just have to look at the mortgage meltdown and ensuing economic collapse of the self-regulated investment banking community to see just how well unfettered and unregulated markets do. If there had been any sort of minimal regulation over derivatives and other insane investment vehicles, all of this might have been avoided, or minimized greatly.
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(4 Comments)The EU parliament is doing what companies won't do to themselves - putting controls on how much they can gouge consumers. If they didn't, the carriers would not ever lower prices - they don't have to. Even though there is massive competition in the telco/wireless space, the companies know they have consumers by the cojones, and would never lower or restrict their roaming fees. The implicitly collude with each other, even though there is no outright collusion, it happens very subtly.
Enough people in the US have now come to realize just what a mistake it is to let companies 'sefl-regulate' and you will see more and more adoption of EU style reforms coming in and helping clean up the mess. It's a good change for once.