Europe's mobile operators are reportedly at odds over their approach to a clamp down on excessive roaming charges that are levied on subscribers who use their phone abroad.
The GSM Association — which represents the mobile industry — cancelled a meeting on Monday with European Commissioner Viviane Reding to discuss her drive to prevent mobile overcharging.
According to the Financial Times, the meeting had to be scrapped because mobile operators in southern Europe are unwilling to compromise on roaming fees as tourism makes them net beneficiaries of roaming charges.
A GSM Association spokesperson confirmed that Monday's meeting with Commissioner Reding had been cancelled, but denied that mobile operators were at war over the issue of roaming.
"We asked the meeting to be postponed until April because it's only two days until the Commission's consultation period ends," said a GSM Association spokesperson. "There's not a lot of detail about what the EC wants to do [about mobile roaming], so we want to see more details before we meet with them."
Commissioner Reding announced in February that she would take action to try and reduce the cost of using a mobile phone abroad. She said that per-minute rates of €5 were "fantasy".
Several ZDNet UK readers have been caught out by roaming costs, especially when using mobile data cards abroad. A common complaint is that they didn't get any warning about how much they were being charged — an issue that the GSM Association takes seriously.
"We're totally in favour of transparency – it will encourage more usage," said the GSM Association.
Talkback
Why can't the cell phone itself display in the lower right corner how much will be billed in total in x days? Including subscription fees and everything else.
That would also make it very easy to randomly inspect the correctness of the figures presented by law enforcers, reporters and consumer protection organizations alike.
Roaming call rates almost entirely go to cover interconnect charges that mobile operators charge each other so, in the end, there is hardly no margin left for the mobile operator.
If roaming charges are to go down for the benefit of end-customers, then lower interconnect charges need to be agreed globally - an global agreement would be needed to achieve this, but which organisation can realistically set up and enforce this?
Roaming charges are set between the operators. If they charge each other high interconnect fees, the they all benefit as the customer ends up paying for it. However, I doubt that high interconnect fees apply in every case. Does Vodafone UK charge Vodafone Germany a high interconnect fee for example? If operators want to encourage more usage then just transparency of prices will not help. What are needed are more sensible tariffs for both voice and, especially data.
Big Telco PLC needs to get this issue sorted and fast. When, for the about the price of a cheap cell phone, you can buy a neat handheld unit that does Bluetooth/WLAN and VoIP; can drop onto the net at any Internet cafe worldwide and call home with zero call charges; the writing is on the wall. Granted the call quality is not that good, but compared to the same technology a mere 2 or 3 years ago it is a significant improvement. With another similar leap in quality and the seemingly endless march of cheap or even free WiFi zones, if the Big Telco doesn't clean up it's act pretty soon, 3G will be utterly irrelevant and along with it these ridiculous roaming charges.
Hi, the best solution is to get a prepaid card of the place you are going to. You can find some on Ebay or Squidoo.com. YOu save tons of money and if you use UMTS for Voip or internet, the savings are huge!