EC praises 3 roaming cuts

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 17 Jan 2007 16:25 GMT

The European Commission has welcomed the move by mobile operator 3 to stop charging customers for roaming between its networks, while other operators have claimed 3 has not broken ranks with them.

On Tuesday, 3 announced that from this month it is removing all surcharges for its customers when they use their 3 mobiles on the company's networks in other countries. The move included all aspects of mobile usage, from voice to data.

You can't get a lot more transparent than free, which is the approach that 3 have taken

Gordon Rawling, Amdocs

If you roam onto someone else's network you revert to higher roaming rates. To me that's not transparent

T-Mobile spokesman

"This announcement shows that there is room for reducing current prices for international roaming, as was proposed by the Commission," a spokesperson for commissioner Viviane Reding, who has long been pushing for operators to cut their roaming charges, said on Wednesday.

The spokesperson added that some operators in other European countries had already dropped their roaming surcharges, but declined to specify which companies or countries.

Reding's campaign has successfully forced cuts of up to 70 percent in wholesale charges, which networks charge each other to interconnect customers. Retail charges — which customers are charged by their own operator — could follow. The threat of legislation has seen operators start to reduce the charges over recent months, although the operators themselves have claimed that their cuts were a natural progression according to market forces.

Approached in the wake of the launch of the "3 Like Home" pricing strategy, operators' reactions followed similar lines. "It just goes to prove that the market is delivering lower prices for customers," said a spokesperson for Vodafone, who insisted that Vodafone's own Passport roaming add-ons offered "great value to our customers in terms of voice and data across Europe".

"Customers understand there are costs associated with connecting calls across Europe," Vodafone's spokesperson added.

Orange said it shared the Commission's "vision of simple, seamless communications for all customers", pointed to roaming cuts of up to 25 percent that it announced last year and hinted that it would be announcing "further refreshes" to its roaming rates in the first half of this year.

A spokesperson for O2 also highlighted its roaming deal, My Europe, which it launched last year, and said the deal — currently available only in Spain, as that is "the destination of over 20 percent of all trips abroad made by the UK" — would be...