Roaming charges end for Europeans
After a decade of debate, Europe will finally abolish cellphone roaming charges this week, allowing people from Britain to Bulgaria to call, send text messages and surf the web without incurring eye-watering charges when travelling across the 28-nation bloc.
The landmark policy shift, which comes into force Thursday, arrives as Europe faces pressure to speed up the overhaul of its wider digital economy to keep pace with the likes of the United States and China. But many are wondering why the region’s policy-makers took 10 years to end roaming charges when it is not a daily concern for many Europeans.
Europe’s decade-long struggle to end cellphone roaming charges began before the original iPhone was released. But it involved often bitter lobbying between the region’s cellular operators and consumer groups over how much people should pay to use their phones internationally. The changes will affect only people with European cellphone contracts.
The move is part of broader efforts to unite the region digitally. Under proposals that include things such as overhauling people’s online privacy rights and allowing individuals to watch digital content from national broadcasters while outside their home countries, the creation of a digital single market has become a crucial pillar to Europe’s economic growth. The goal, according to policy-makers, is to give Europeans simple and unfettered access to services such as movie streaming and cloud computing no matter where they live.
Critics point to data showing that a minority of Europeans regularly travel beyond their national borders to charge that the changes may offer limited benefit to most Europeans’ daily online activities.
“There’s just a small percentage of consumers who will benefit from the scrapping of roaming charges,” said Luca Schiavoni, a telecom regulation analyst at Ovum, a technology research group. “It’s for the few, not the many.”
Defenders of Europe’s digital policies reject such criticism, saying that removing cellphone roaming charges took time because it represented the bedrock for the rest of the region’s digital plans. It is hard to watch Netflix or shop on Amazon while travelling, they say, if you cannot first connect to the Internet.
For Viviane Reding, a former European commissioner who shepherded the roaming overhaul through Brussels’s legislative process, the reduction in cellphone bills is a marked improvement. Even if Europeans travel abroad a couple of times a year, they now can avoid extortionately high prices for calls or Internet browsing.
“It’s the biggest change Europe has ever made digitally,” said Reding, now a member of the European Parliament. “The new rules will apply to every company operating in the whole European market.”
Yet, like most changes to European digital policy, the scrapping of roaming charges is by no means the end of the debate. Consumer groups and European officials are already voicing concerns that people may still see costly fees on their cellphone bills.
While there will be strict caps on how much telecom operators can charge when individuals are outside their home countries, cellphone carriers can increase other fees, including phone calls and text messages to other European countries when people are not travelling, to recoup potential lost income.
Lise Fuhr, director general of ETNO, a telecom industry group, said companies were offering competitive prices across Europe. But, she added, operators needed investmentfriendly policies — not further regulation — if Europe wanted to build much-needed highspeed broadband networks and other digital infrastructure.