Word of the Day: psychurgy. Mental energy or function
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Deadline for EU data roaming looms
MUCH AS EXPECTED, Viviane Reding, the EU's Telecoms Commissioner, is pushing ahead with plans to regulate the cost of texting (SMS) and data while roaming in the Europen Union.
Reding is sticking to the threat that she made at the Mobile World Congress to set a deadline of July 1st 2008 for the mobile operators to do something about these tariffs.
She is intending to publish the latest prices for roamed texts and data downloading on a government website. If they're still too high, in her opinion, she will propose regulation. Given here success in creating the Eurotariff (see INQ passim) for voice roaming calls, this is no empty threat.
This announcement was made in front of 27 assembled heads of country-specific EU telecoms watchdogs. They all responded favourably to the move on SMS costs.
However, there's a general consensus that the time is not quite right to set specific tariffs for data roaming. French junior minister, Luc Chatel, told Reuters that the issue of data roaming is more complicated.
Trade body, the GSMA (GSM Association) claimed that data roaming is too young for price cap intervention by the EU Commissioner and that competition is still increasing.
It would be hard to see how a measure to regulate the cost of data roaming could be introduced on a EU-wide basis, when only a slim majority of mobile network operators already offer 'unlimited' (all-you-can-eat) data tariffs.
Given that all those tariffs have upper limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded in a month, how could the EU get everybody to agree what that upper limit was? ยต
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And in finland you've got all you can eat buffet on edge and 3g without transfer limits, but a "p2p ban" clause in the TOS instead, as some operators try to compete directly with adsl. I think i use about 20+ gigs of mobile data per month, most of it when my phone acts modem for my computer. Some of the operators have had capacity problems due to the explosive growth, but they seem to be upgrading the backhaul to fat ethernet based technology instead of throttles or limits. Hopefully this will keep limits away, or atleast put them high enough that you don't have to worry if you accidentally leave a hdtv channel streaming over iptv for a week. 

Oddly, the soon nationwide 450MHz broadband network has both quadruple pricing and claustrophobia inducing transfer caps. Needless to say, the operator of that network has their PR drones working overtime trying to spin the so far poor commercial success...