Operators slam €urocrat's plans to slash pricing

THE EU'S communications minister, Viviane Reding, wants to abolish the practice by mobile phone companies of charging extra when subscribers use their mobile phones abroad - a facility known as 'roaming'.

It's been estimated that such charges account for £6.9 billion in revenues which equates to some 15 per cent of operators' total revenues. Ms Reding wants to replace this with the 'home pricing principle' - whereby it costs the same for a Brit to call Paris from London as it does to call Newcastle.

Paris is, of course, closer. "It is high time that the EU's internal market delivered substantially lower communication charges for consumers and business people travelling abroad," Mrs Reding said on Tuesday [28th March].

The proposals will open up a whole can of worms. Chiefly because of the way in which the mobile market is structured in each individual EU nation. The operators are also claiming that they have too little time to respond properly. They've only been given from April 3rd to 28th - which works out at 18 working days.

By contrast, Ms Reding hopes to have the legislation in place by the Summer of 2007. Her initiative comes after the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, got the EU summit to back a move to do something about roaming charges.

Irish foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, who lives just five miles south of the border at Blackrock, Co Louth, is cheesed off with being 'welcomed to the UK' when his handset roams onto a British network. Similar chaos ensues in the Benelux countries where it is easy to accidentally 'roam' onto a 'foreign' network.

The GSM Association (GSMA), which represents mobile operators, say that prices for roaming have actually been coming down. "Data from a sample of key operators with customers in 12 European countries indicates that roaming tariffs fell by an average of 8 per cent across Europe last year," it claimed.

The mobile operators best defence, of course, will be one of victimisation. How come their networks are being so heavily regulated when the fixed line operators still charge higher rates for consumers to call other countries in the EU? They certainly haven't had to pay £ billions for licences to operate their networks over the last five years. µ