It has been a fast track process for European Commissioner for Information, Society and Media, Viviane Reding, who has this week pushed through the European Parliament the proposals first aired back in September to put a cap on data roaming charges.
The feisty Euro Commissioner has learned the hard way on how to push a campaign, after a two year fight with cellular operators to bring down voice roaming. Much of the data roaming cut will slash into text roaming charges from around Europe as well as web surfing and other data based services such as music downloading.
As she first predicted, the passing of the order by the European Parliament this week will mean it can become law by July. In opposition to this, cellular operators have been saying that its very tough in a recession to keep customers, without having to cut charges as well, but there has been no evidence of that among the majors during the past quarter.
Most of the major European and US based operators have shown that their cellular divisions have been impervious to the recession, pushed along on a wave of mobile broadband data dongles and SIM-only contract sales. So the European Parliament saw no reason to be sympathetic with the only section of business that has been able to ignore the recession.
Wholesale data prices will be capped at €0.50 per megabyte, which should also put a floor on retail prices, which are still more like €4 per megabyte. Roaming on texts will go to €0.11each. The European Parliament also voted to drop voice roaming caps to €0.40 a minute, but to only impose this until 2012.
Martin Whitehead, European Affairs Director of the GSMA, a carrier industry group, told Reuters, ‘We are concerned with the committee reducing the safeguard cap to €0.50. We believe €1 is a true safeguard.’ Reding had originally proposed a €1 charge, but the Parliament took it down to €0.50.
Reding will step down from her role at the end of this year and has constantly attacked excessive roaming charges of all types from cellular operators, which have wrought havoc in roaming charges across the 27 country European Union, with no two prices being alike and all of them resulting in Bill Shock, when people returned to their home country.