Tags: legislation, mobile, roaming

The European Commission released a report earlier this week that stated that consumers still do not enjoy significantly lower tariffs when roaming (using their mobile phone abroad), despite the fact that mobile operators in Europe have had to reduce roaming charges in line with maximum price caps introduced by EU rules. Most operators have retail prices that hover around the maximum legal caps, and the Commission believes they could do more to lower prices.
This is as sad as it is predictable. After all, several UK mobile operators tried to challenge the EU’s Roaming Regulation in the EU Court of Justice, but failed in their bid to prevent the new rules coming into force last summer.
Since 1 July 2009, the maximum cost of a text message sent from abroad has been capped at €0.11/£0.10 (it was previously €0.28), while the cost of making a call from your mobile while abroad will fall from €0.46 to €0.35 per minute by July 2011.
Funnily enough, despite an estimated 12 per cent decline in travel, the Commission’s report found that overall volumes of calls received and texts sent while abroad in the EU have grown over the past two years. Following the introduction of the EU-wide €0.11 SMS price cap, 20 per cent more text messages were sent in the summer of 2009 than in the previous summer.
Is there possibly a message in here somewhere? Not just for text messaging, but for data roaming too. The report also found that average consumer prices for data roaming at the end of 2009 were €2.66 per MegaByte, with operators charging each other an average of €0.55 per MegaByte. That, to my mind at least, still looks like a pretty reasonable mark-up.
And in the midst of all this, there’s a big football tournament going on in South Africa at the moment, with hundreds of thousands of football fans from around the world travelling to watch their team in action.
So how many operators are offering ‘World Cup Specials’, including a bundle of texts that they can send home from S. Africa at a lower price, maybe some picture messages too, and some discounted data roaming, so they can keep up with all the news from the tournament via mobile websites, or one of the many World Cup apps that have been released for the tournament.
I don’t know, but my guess would be: none. Certainly, when we asked the question of UK operators a couple of months ago for an article we were researching, most didn’t bother to answer, and the ones that did said they had no such plans.
I wonder when mobile operators will wake up to the reality that any fool can sell anyone anything once. But if users find it doesn’t work, or it costs too much, they’ll never buy it again.
As a result, for most people in S. Africa for the World Cup, the mobile phone will be used as a last resort, because they don’t really know what it’s costing them, but they suspect it might be rather a lot.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The operator that puts together a package like the one described above would, I am convinced, see high uptake and increased revenue, even if it wasn’t quite as profitable as all the calls, texts, picture messages and data traffic that they could sell at full price if people weren’t so terrified of using them.
Maybe by the time the Olympics come to London in 2012, the operators will have got their act together. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

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