EU sets timeline for single telecom market | Hacker News Reader

EU sets timeline for single telecom market

euobserver.com

39 pointscrayola37 comments

I really liked this until I read this sentence:

>> "Europe has 1,200 fixed operators and over a hundred mobile operators. The US has six mobile operators and China has three."

Prices and competition in the US are abysmal compared with most EU countries. The goal should be to reduce the number of duplicate operators (O2 + Telefonica), not get down to a small number of carriers with little competition.

The shameless and outrageous sodomy of the consumer by every telco in every EU country (especially when roaming) and the vested interest of continuing to sodomize consumers in this way makes me highly doubt that any of these companies have any interest at all in creating a "single telco" market as described in this article.

> The shameless and outrageous sodomy of the consumer by every telco in every EU country

Speak for your country. I'm pretty happy with the competition in Finland.

When I'm at home, I'm also pretty happy with both voice and data package.

However, I'm not at home right now and the roaming charges are outrageous. Forget about data (25 MB for 2 EUR?) and the voice also isn't something to write home about.

Btw, UK HNers: could someone of you recommend data SIM of about half a gig, but one that is valid for one week and then I can forget about it? The operators I tried to ask were not happy to offer something non-recurring.

Take a look at these: http://www.o2.co.uk/tariffs/payandgo £20 will get you 250 mins, 2500 texts, 500MB data.

The number won't disappear after a week but you're not locked in to a contract, it looks like a standard PAYG sim.

O2, while it is prepaid, has monthly pricing structure. It is not quite standard pay&go sim (they have the exact pricing structure in my home country. It is good plan, but not for visitors).

Anyway, thank you.

Three will sell you a prepaid sim with a 1GB allowance for £10.50. They have retail branches just about everywhere.

http://store.three.co.uk/Mobile_Broadband/Plans/Pay_As_You_G...

Have you tried giffgaff? They offer 500mb for 5 quid, data only and no contract:

http://giffgaff.com/goodybags

No, just the usual suspects (O2, Vodafone).

I'll try this, thanks.

EDIT: oh, it looks like you have to order the SIM online and they send it to you. Not sure if it will make it, I'm leaving at Friday :(. Maybe just to have it ready for next visit.

Three might be worth a look. Should be able to pick up a sim at most mobile phone shops. Note you aren't allow to tether on their pay as you go sims.

Are telecoms which operate in one country (i.e. Germany) unable to operate in neighboring countries (i.e. France)?

No (see: Orange, Telefónica or Deutsche Telecom), but each operation will be its own entity with different regulations, different network and different numbering availability. Each country is its own market.

The goal here is apparently to have a single pan-european market, and allow cross-country organizations where e.g. O2 (Telefónica) would be the same O2 in every country where it has presence, without consumers having to pay for roaming and the like. An other goal is most likely cross-european number portability (e.g. moving from Italy to Slovenia, switching operator to a local slovenian one yet keeping the same number).

On the other hand, they also hint at a desire for US-type consolidations and this is pushed by big telco operators, that's extremely worrying.

There are some big ones like Vodafone, Orange, OTE, T-mobile, Telefonica, which operate in multiple countries, but I think even if you use Orange in one country, and go visit another country with Orange, you still pay for roaming, so I guess they are seen as different entities in each country and she wants the groups to be seen as single entities.

Hopefully this won't slow down competition like in US, and allow for price fixing.

Europe is populated far more densely than the US and there is plenty of competition in individual markets (e.g. Germany), so I doubt that this will slow down competition.

What I really hope it will achieve is abolishment of roaming in any particular form – I have a German contract with German O2, currently stay in the UK and am usually logged in(?) to O2 UK’s network. Yet this is ‘roaming’ and forces me to pay more for calls, while paying less for texts (€0.1 per text by EU regulation rather than unregulated €0.19 at home).

> What I really hope it will achieve is abolishment of roaming in any particular form

I'd also like cross-EU number portability, I moved country a few years ago and had to change my mobile phone number, that was annoying.

If there wasn’t any roaming, you could simply keep your old contract?

Yes, but there may also be some sort of local operator with more interesting prices or offers.

Nope. UK have Orange, Italy have WIND. They are the same company, have the same branding - same everything - but it still costs me an arm and a leg to use my phone when I'm in Italy.

Yes for mobiles. Licences are sold by each state separately. If they were sold by a new EU institution, there would be EU-wide operators instead of state-wide ones.

Don't the telecoms companies make huge profits on roaming fees? Would this then mean that the companies would be pushing against this move?

Europe has already imposed increasingly more strict caps on roaming fees and many operators now offer a one-off fee per month for europe wide 'tariff transfer' to take your free included minutes with you as you travel - they get more from that fee than they do from roaming fees. This sounds like the final removal of roaming fees altogether - remember in Europe you do not pay to /receive/ calls in your home area unlike the US & Canada so it is a bit of an anomaly to have roaming fees for receiving calls when you move around the EU.

Of course, the roaming fees /outside/ Europe are now eye-watering.

I think you are confused ;)

They'll continue to charge roaming fees anyway, right up until they lose a lawsuit over it. Why would they do anything else?

Why would they lose a lawsuit over it?

Because that company which is operating a network across several EU countries (which is one market) is, among other things, discriminating against users based on their location in the EU.

Remember that the EU was "born" with the main objective of creating a "single market" through the standardisation of laws across all member states.

Well, yes, if it's the same company across the different countries, but supposedly there will still be a lot of carriers that only serve a country or two, so roaming will still be common, no?

Essentially roaming disappears for everybody within the EU. Either because (i) if you are a large telco and your network has merged with other ones; (ii) if you are a small MVNO your network agreement subrogates to the new merged network.

Still, there is some lobby going on in the EU which wants to detach operators from the network, and make the network independent from everybody. NetCo + OpCo != TelCo.

I really hope this last scenario happens. But it's a bit of a utopia.

I expect they will do at the EU level what many countries already do internally: cheap "handoff" between operators (where one operator essentially becomes virtual in a zone where it has no physical coverage), so the user isn't impacted.

FWIW MVNO (operators with no physical network and leasing network time) are already very common in the EU.

Because if the EU becomes a single telco market there is no justification for intra-EU roaming fees: the market itself is the "home network" and roaming fees are specifically when the device is outside its home network.

I'm not an expert, But I'd imagine the opportunities for growth would override the desire to preserve revenue from roaming.

It differs a lot between different companies. Some have a LOT of roaming income, some not much at all.

Yup. 30MB for £15 a month! Wow, thanks Orange. >:(

>“If one individual would like to watch high-definition films of what one petabyte means, it would take 13 years non-stop,” he added.

I'm not sure what this means.

Perhaps that 13 years of HD video data can fit in a petabyte?

Yes, it seems to be a very confused way of saying "watching a petabyte of HD video", and completely fails at giving a sense of scale for a petabyte.

I actually think it does a good job at giving a sense of scale for a petabyte in terms of video hours. "13 years of HD video" does a lot more for me than "1 million gigabytes," which was basically my frame of reference before. However that's only if you can actually interpret what it's trying to say.

Yeah my trouble was that they referenced "how much is a petabyte" and "videos nonstop for 13 years" but failed to say "one petabyte of videos related to how big one petabyte is would take 13 years to watch".

I think that explanation makes more sense.

13 years of lossy compressed HD video perhaps.

RAW 32 * 1920 * 1080 * 60FPS * 60seconds * 60 minutes /8bits ~= 1.6TB per hour and about 26days for a PetaByte.

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