UK Government tried to kill Eurotariffs

[andy]

In the consultation period one of the sources identified in that article (INTUG) submitted a suggestion that incoming calls should be free, and outgoing calls the same as the normal price for ringing a landline in the home country, as the wholesale cost would be under 5 cents a munte. This seems to rather neglect the fact that calls to other mobiles are more expensive than landlines.

We are sure that the mobile industry will say that there needs to be a price premium for roaming over national calls, since there are additional costs. The additional costs are those incurred for carrying a call between EU countries on terrestrial networks. Volume prices for such calls are on offer to business customers for less than 5€cents a minute; clearly wholesale costs are somewhat lower than this. Hence INTUG concludes that the marginal cost of roaming over the cost of providing national services is very small. In the interests of promoting a single pan-EU market in telecoms, we therefore suggest that roaming prices within the EU should be pegged to the same price as those charged for calls from mobiles to fixed numbers within the operators home state, and as a consequence, the practice of charging users for receiving a call on their mobile within the EU should also be abolished and prohibited. This action would result in a level playing field for both businesses and consumers compared with the US, where flat rate price packages when roaming across states have been available for some years.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_soci...docs/comments/

I think that this is perhaps a little unrealistic, as even when not roaming termination fees for European mobiles are higher than for landlines, and almost all more than 5 cents a minute. Have they extracted this from the comparison with the USA, with landlines and mobiles the same rate to the caller; have they forgotten that incoming calls there are chargeable to the receiver?