Europe drafts law to ban mobile roaming charges
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Delicious tears.
Though I object to the use of the word "cost", it will remove unmerited earnings but will not add costs to their balance sheet: notice how the operators whining the most are the pan-european ones? That's because they can currently charge roaming fees for operations within their network, fleecing their own users.
This means you take on huge credit when building the networks, meant to be downpaid over years and decades. If the future revenue stream disappears, you may very well be losing money on your initial investment.
I'm not saying many of the telcos couldn't do with a bit less profit, but don't pretend losing revenue is a non-issue. I'd say its likely a complete restructure of networks and service operators would be needed to really get rid of the roaming charges.
Except in this case there are constraints that prevent full competition. There are only a handful of mobile phone companies that operate their own infrastructure. They constitute a oligopoly and a form of natural monopoly that can more or less dictate prices. The point of regulating utilities is to prevent this.
You can't remove the reasons this happens, you can however regulate it to either somehow cause a competitive market or prevent the monopolist from leveraging their position and price gouging.
Now, obviously cell phone carriers are not a monopoly. They are actually an oligopoly[1], but that doesn't change much and the barriers that lead to it are the same.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
In a really free market, anyone could transmit in any frequency, jamming everyone else. Could quickly degenerate into a costest of who jacks up power more.
Everyone should get a more consistent bill, which they can plan for accordingly, instead of a disgusting surprise defilement as is the case now.
What is idiotic, it only makes everyone to install Viver/Skype/whatever and use phone functionality less.
Consider, for example, GiffGaff (part of O2): within the UK, 10p/min. Meanwhile, calling internationally from the UK: Germany, 5p/min; India, 2p/min; USA, 3p/min.
This also creates incentives for people to setup grey routes. It's common to buy local prepaid SIM cards then hook them up to a GSM bank and sell "international" connectivity to calling card companies. One guy had his setup inside a van, so he could drive around town and avoid being triangulated by the local telco. (The local equivalent of the FCC will raid and steal your equipment if they can find you.)
If people are currently paying roaming costs, then the earnings are clearly merited. You might find the practice distasteful, and wish it did not exist, but that does not make it illegitimate; they found something the market would pay for, and successfully got the market to pay for it.
There's no monopoly on cell carriers, as evidenced by the three separate carriers mentioned just in the sentence you quoted.
Now, there could be argument that the public should not change the rules after the fact or whenever we feel like it. Instead review the contracts every 5 years or so and make changes then.
I could apply the same logic to a protection racket [1]; if people pay up, it's merited.
[1] I'm not saying this is a protection racket; I'm saying that people paying doesn't necessarily make it merited.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
And not just on lower prices and better service, but actually more freedom and choice.
Cross-border roaming was the last thing that was still unregulated. Other than that, Europe is a telecommunications paradise for businesses and consumers compared to the US.
Bad regulations is not the same as unregulated.
And all because of regulation.
This is simply not universally true. The cell market doesn't exist without regulation. If any company can throw up a tower on any frequency and start a cell company the end paying customer is going to have a horrible experience.
It is a fallacy to believe that frequency regulation is needed for services to come to market. Coopetition does happen in the real world (see all the devices made for open spectrum like 2.4ghz)
47 CFR 15 (and other countries' equivalents) probably counts as regulations.
I'm outta here I just thought the userbase here would be less liberal.
Have fun back at your anti-vaccination ultra-Christian extreme right-wing shill site, paid for by the Koch brothers in the hope that poor people will keep voting against their own interests (yup, we can say emotional trigger-words instead of presenting facts as well, just like you can!)
The very reasons to maintain some form of roaming charges comes down to, who built the towers? Who invested in the hardware, software, and persons, working to provide the service? I do not care one wit about this claim "public resources" when it comes to cell phones? Why not? Because it is a patent excuse to take. The same excuse is used when people want specific speech censored from the airwaves but not another. However, hell and high water reign should the same taking be done to something techies hold near and dear to their hearts, you would never see them support taking of speech rights or such with regards to their blogs, sites, and whatnot.
Back to roaming charges. Should we not then force nation states to not charge access fees to their networks? Many do. They charge carriers for calls going into their state owned agencies.
Simply put, don't allow roaming charges and costs will be spread to anyone using a cell phone, whether they roam or not. You cannot legislate away costs, you certainly can profit, but I guess the private investor should have known better. Kind of like government bonds, they are only really guaranteed the day they are written
Intercontinental roaming charges are a bad joke (3$ incoming, 5$ out and yes, that's per minute) . What I do is to get a local SIM and communicate the number to those contacts that need it.
Internet (sometimes 20$ per MB and yes, you read that right) is less of a problem due the ubiquity of free WLANs.
Another really excellent thing the EU did is to mandate mini USB as phone chargers. With the noticeable exception of Apple every newer phone can be charged with any newer charger. This used to be a major pet peevee of mine.
As for the roaming charges, I completely agree. Even now, within Europe, it's really bad for data. I've traveled through 10 EU countries in the last 3 months, and had to buy 7 SIM cards, as my home carrier charges 2EUR for 5MB. I was lucky with my 3LikeHome sim card from Austria, which you can use with your home rates in a few other countries.
Yeah but that's an adapter, even though it does abide by the rules you still have to carry the adapter around. Most manufacturers just switched to miniUSB entirely, so you don't need an adapter, any combination of charger and phone should work (in practice there may be issues with undervoltage, I've seen combinations of phones and chargers not work)
As for amount of power, I believe the USB power delivery spec allows 5V devices to draw up to 10W of power (5V at 2A) - though it's fairly new (2012), so I don't know how widely used it is yet.
[1] Motorola, LGE, Samsung, RIM, Nokia, SonyEricsson, NEC, Apple, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments
And the power ratings are functionally design minimums so your USB device must work within those boundaries, while most phones and phone chargers can exceed them.
My kindle charger outputs 5 V 1.8 A for a total of 9 watts.
My droid charger outputs 5.1 V 0.75 A for a total of 3.8 watts.
Wasn't it the Chinese who originally mandated that? Either way, it's a good thing.
(and it is _micro_ USB. Not that much smaller than mini USB, but thinner and better, mechanically. See http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-was...)
I can confirm, just checked my data roaming rate (from the EU), it's 0.15€/MB for European (not just EU, also Switzerland, Norway or Iceland) roaming (which is already crazy expensive, my in-country plan is 0.0075€/MB even ignoring that it also provides voice and SMS); 0.30€/MB from the US and 13.00€/MB from just about everywhere else
One of the most disruptive ideas the EU is working on (among alternatives) is detaching the network from the operators. This can considerably reduce network capex, homogenise network technology and allow for a real single EU telecom space.
By having operators become clients of a single network users will benefit from increase pan-EU competition, with more competitive and transparent rates.
This has been partly done at national levels in similar sectors, specially in the gas and electricity sectors (see National Grid in the UK, Snam Rete Gas & Terna in Italy, etc.). Gas and electricity networks are private but regulated, and third parties have access rights to the network to retail gas & electricity. In this telecom case, operators don't have commodity risk, which makes third-party access to the network infinitely easier.
Fingers crossed.
Since i was quite young it blew my mind that we didn't have one universal network which every network utilises. It is clearly more efficient, removes redundancy, spreads costs.
> Thus the network might as well be owned and run by the government...
Given a choice, I'd rather not live in such an ecosystem. Again.
We did that in the UK with our train network. It isn't working out so well.
[0] This only works in state-subsidised short-distance trains, long-distance trains not operated by Deutsche Bahn need different tickets, I believe the same goes for France.
If we want mobile networks detached from mobile infrastructure, we're going to have to legislate that, not piddle around with legislating roaming fees.
Won't that lead to a slowdown in the development and implementation of new wireless technology? What incentive would governments have to upgrade existing cell towers to new technology?
Electric cables, water pipes, and gas lines don't need to be replaced every 5 years by new technology.
But for home internet connections that could be a good move.
But I think it's actually the hardest part to solve, and the reason why I'm pessimistic about the whole thing.
I hate roaming charges as much as anyone, nobody wants to pay 200%+ when they go to France or anywhere else within the EU. That being said, competition at least around here for mobile/3G is extremely healthy, prices have come down year on year and the choice/availability has gone up.
What I fear would happen if this went into force is that many (all?) of the smaller operators would go out of business overnight as they couldn't find a network within all continental european countries who will roam for them at a reasonable price.
Then you'll have Orange/Vodafone/etc who own a lot of the infrastructure across europe leverage that so essentially they're the only competitive player and get to set the prices however they want. They'll sell their subsidiaries roaming at X and their competition roaming at X*1,000.
Just look at the US: Their networks are inter-state, and as a result of having to cover such a large landmass it is almost non competitive. You have three companies controlling the whole country. Prices are extremely high and services/choice is poor.
I'd take what we have now, roaming charges and all, over a three network oligopoly.
I'm not sure about exact numbers, but at the moment I think they can charge eachother somewhere around 10 to 20 cents per minute at most (it differs for active/passive roaming). This limit would of course have to be lowered if roaming charges for customers were to be abolished.
I also wonder who will want to invest in next generation networks if the government regulates prices even in fiercely competitive markets.
I'd argue the fact that the EU legislates for customer's rather than for business' benefit is part of the reason the mobile market there is in so much better shape than here.
You need to consider where we come from. Back in the 80s most EU countries had exactly one telco, which was owned and operated by the government. I remember very well that prices back then were exorbitant compared to the US.
When they privatised the industry, they created regulators to make sure private competitors could even enter the markets that were still dominated by the formerly state run behemoths. So all of a sudden there were tons of telcos, they were very well regulated and tried to expand beyond their national borders creating even more competition in the process. That's what led to lower prices.
But the kind of regulation that creates functioning markets is very different from the kind of crude price regulation they are attempting to do now. What we're seeing now is the EU trying to be populist and shake their image as being remote and disconnected from people's needs.
The telecom sector has been consolidating for a while now and we don't have as many players in the market as before. That's what regulators should focus on, not prices of particular services.
It's not as if they're regulating the price of minutes or packages or something, here. They're outlawing a very particular class of charges with a very particular meaning, with what appears to be a very good reason.
Exactly. The current law about customer level pricing also includes wholesale pricing regulation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati...
Limits at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati... give EUR 0.10 per minute of across-operator roaming charges.
I doubt that would be legal. Anyone knows for sure?
For one example, Vodafone UK for £3 will let you use your "UK minutes, texts, and data" in any european country. The reason they're able to offer that is because Vodafone runs networks in most european countries.
However you look at it the customer is the one getting screwed here. They are only bitching because they're being forced to re think their business model and make it more fair.
When you think that Vodaphone is doing it even if you're still using their network just in another country it makes you think what's the difference between this and stealing? They're not competing with themselves so it's basically a scheme to make more money.
Now, when Company A and Company B are actually two divisions of the same parent company (which is apparently often the case for Vodaphone) then you're right; the roaming fees are double-dipping.
Plus we're talking about roaming here it's not like a lot of people decide to go on vacation at the same time and stay there for years until the company collapses.
Have a look at the "Wholesale caps (Operator to Operator)" table. That is regulated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati...
Where are you getting 3 from? Verizon, Sprint,(CDMA) AT&T, T-Mobile.(GSM) That's 4. There was a proposal for AT&T to buy T-Mobile but the Justice Department blocked that merger to preserve competition in the cellphone business.[1][2]
[1]http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/08/justice-depar...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile_...
With our currently mobile population, I'm not sure everyone would like that. I have a phone number from a place I haven't lived in the past 6 years. I'm never going to change my number, and I know I'm going to move to a new place sometime in my life, probably more than once.
AT&T paid T-Mobile billions of dollars as a result of the failed merger, so they were going to supposedly use that to improve their network. I didn't notice an improvement.
As far as that "idea":
- An "open source network" makes no sense at all. Open source, what? Open source customer's billing information? The Linux OS that drives most networks already?
- Elon Musk could have already done so in the US or Canada given how horrible the networks are in either country. He hasn't.
- Elon Musk doesn't work in communications currently.
- Elon Musk isn't like the joker of the deck that you can just use to solve any issue or play any hand.
Or even better, wait for it:
An Uber for Elon Musk.
Where do I collect my funding?
-If customers were being tricked into paying roaming charges in nefarious ways;
-If there were serious externalities somehow not being included in the roaming charge transaction
-If there were monopolistic / market manipulating behaviour going on.
-If the companies were subject to a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where private resolution was not feasible (they're not- the public broadcast spectrum is both rival and excludable in practice).
Instead, the state interest according to Kroes is that it's an "irritant." This kind of top-down control seems a bit counter to the hacker/startup ethos.
Edit: if you're going to down vote, please can you comment and have a dialogue?
In the current situation, as a customer, when I'm on holiday in another EU country I have three options for using my iPhone on the go:
1) Shelling out for roaming costs, which are expensive, extremely untransparent, and seem very arbitrary. What are these costs for? Who determines what the right price is? 2) Buying a SIM-card in the country of my destination, which is cheaper but also prevents me from using my own phone number while abroad 3) Not using mobile data at all and hoping for free WiFi at my hotel or in the nearest village (which is what I do)
Removing roaming costs altogether means I can freely drive to France for a two-week holiday and use Google Maps or check my email on my iPhone, all within my normal data bundle, without the risk of getting a bill of a few hundred Euro.
Not a all. Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange completely agree with you.
> Instead, the state interest according to Kroes is that it's an "irritant."
The state interest is the people's interest. Roaming charges are not in the user's interest:
1. It's very easy to be hit by roaming charges in Europe if you're not careful, many countries can be gone through in an hour or three and since Schengen moving across borders has become an habitual past-time.
2. The charges are not fair and not about costs these days, they're about free money, notice how the operators which have issues with that are present or have partnerships in pretty much all of the EU? A roaming user doesn't cost them much, but it earns them a lot.
3. Roaming charges are especially problematic with modern "always connected" smartphones, forgetting to disable data roaming (if you can even do so) is common, and the charges for data roaming are completely crazy.
I mean, why does my phone prefer the crappy network that I have my crappy subscription with over the much stronger networks of the competitors? Why would this stop working when I'm near the border?
Of course they do, they already have near continental wireless coverage. The small carriers don't.
This would obviously lead to no more roaming at all, which run the small carriers out of business and creates a huge barrier for entry to new carriers (as the would need a huge network before even launching your service).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati...
For anyone who travels, it really is a hassle in 2013 to have to put everything digital in your life on hold and stop relying on your smartphone just because you are moving around inside of Europe.
Given how small the oligopoly of those companies is, and how they charge roaming fees even when you are still using their own network (only it's another subsidiary in another country), roaming fees seems to me like a case of distorted competition.
Letting providers do as they want without restraints does not create desireable outcomes, as can be clearly seen right now. So it's necessary to apply some restraints that do create those desireable outcomes.
If your phone rings abroad, and you don't pick it up, and the call goes to voicemail, they charge you for an incoming call and for an outgoing call. Even if the caller doesn't speak on your voicemail, you are billed at least 1 minute active + 1 minute passive.
Assume you're an Austrian, and you miss 3 calls while in Montenegro, that's 20€ in unexpected charges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati...
Edit: I just realized Montenegro is not in the EU yet, so you may be right!
Then there's something wrong with your operator. Roaming charges are for the "international" segment: from home, to the country you are, and from the country you are to home. That's why you pay extra to make calls, and that's why you get to pay when you receive calls.
But it's also "opt-in": you only pay for what you accept. You won't pay for SMS because you can't elect to receive them or not. And, if you miss, or reject a call, it goes to your voicemail. And the voicemail is in your country operator's. So, of course, you won't pay. Unless you have a weird phone and the voicemail is in your phone. Then turn off your weird mobile phone.
It's result of a quirk of how voicemail calls get routed: If you set up call diversion to your voicemail with your network, you'd not pay anything.
But if you fail to answer, or divert calls to voicemail with your phone, the calls would get routed to the network your phone is active in, you'd fail to answer, and the call would get routed back by the operator you're roaming with, rather than having that operator somehow just signal that the calls should be diverted at source, and you'd get to pay for the pleasure.
At least that's the excuse the operators used. Of course it was particularly shitty that they'd charge people extortionate rates due to shortcomings of the way they do call routing.
Probably something intentionally made by your operator — but in Spain, I don't know of a single mobile operator who does not route voicemail at their own network level.
If the market was operating efficiently roaming charges wouldn't be so high. They are high which discourages use and so is a drag on the whole economy (apart from the telcos).
If we left everything to the free market we would have the same problems the US has with it's telecoms infrastructure. Communications, just like other utilities are too important to the economy for governments to ignore.
The telecom situation in the USA, much like their healthcare, is not messed up because it's a free market, it's messed up because governments, under the guise of creating a free market, introduce absolutely brain-dead regulations that achieve the exact opposite of a free market and the corporations take advantage of that to gouge consumers, free from worries about competition because it's not a free market.
I re-upvoted you.
I utterly disagree with your reasoning, but downvoting HN contributors for having a different opinion should really be beyond us and there's nothing in your post, which warrants downvoting.
Then you need spectrum licenses. And since you're placing cell towers around, you're either going to rent rather expensive towers, or build your own, which requires permits and a lot of civil engineering.
It's a bit easier today, as there's more infrastructure in place - but you may very well end up needing to provide the network backhaul from a cell site, somehow get power lines to the cell site. And that cell site might need backup power, which require refueling and maintenance every now and then, you might need to build a small cabin to house the gear, and you might need to hire helicopters to fly in that gear.
When you get this far, you need a marketing department, so people can actually buy connectivity, refill cards, sim card distribution, and similar.
At some point you might need roaming agreements with others as well. If your're lucky the government requires you to have agreements with other operators in your country - important enough, cause unless you have greate coverage people won't bother if they can't use their phone. If you want your customers to use their phone while abroad, you get to make individual roaming agreements with all those other operators in other countries.
> If there were monopolistic / market manipulating behaviour going on.
In practice, with few exceptions, before the regulation started (remember, the EU already sets roaming price caps), there was a form of cartel system, at least informally; prices were pretty much standard and extremely high.
(didn't down vote you btw)
Like, living on the border and your phone checks into the wrong side of the border and you get billed 1000nds? Tricked like that?
(Disclaimer: I don't live in Europe)
To people from US; Imagine living on the east coast (with the smaller states) and every time you move outside of your state, you had to use a feature phone.
For example, if you are on T-Mobile USA, living on the east coast, anytime you drive west, after about 100km your "4G" smartphone is reduced to a feature phone (either on T-Mobile's own GRPS/EDGE-only network, or hyper-restricted voice/sms-only roaming on AT&T).
This happens even if the other operators have extensive 3G/4G/LTE networks available in those cities.
The budget carriers which resell existing networks (TracFone, Virgin, SimpleMobile, etc) have no roaming at all, so when you leave the coverage area of the resold network you just don't have a working phone. Legally 911 will work, but nothing else.
The USA is HUGE. It's not cost effective to put data where every inch of land is covered, ever slow data (EDGE). There's a ton of sparsely populated land, and rural areas. T-Mobile is a small operator and has the crappiest network coverage. It is 1000x better than it was 4 years ago, as they are adding more coverage, but it is expensive and slow. T-mobile is the worst for data coverage, and voice coverage. I had them for years, and I eventually dropped them for Verizon because I was finding myself without any cellphone service so often, because I travel often, and I find myself in rural areas. If I stayed in the city all the time it would work for me. That means no voice, no SMS, no data.
Take a look at T-Mobile's 3G and 4G coverage map (and voice):
http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/pcc.aspx/
Verizon:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/support/coverage-locator
Sprint:
http://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp
AT&T:
http://www.att.com/maps/wireless-coverage.html
The other big issue is we have two standards here. GSM and CDMA. GSM is what T-Mobile and AT&T use, and CDMA is what Verizon and Sprint use. These can't play nice-nice with each other. Plus AT&T's 3G was different from T-Mobile's 3G so a AT&T 3G phone couldn't work with T-Moble's 3G signal and vice-visa.
With 4G LTE, I believe this is a standard that both GSM and CDMA are "upgrading" to. I know that my CDMA phone needed a SIM card to work with the 4G LTE network (CDMA cards previously didn't require SIM cards).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23896896
(This doesn't look to be symmetric, for some reason--if you're a Three customer in one of those countries I don't think you avoid roaming charges in the UK.)
I also like the look of this. Not quite full network neutrality but in the same spirit.
So if you have a number in France, but you call mostly UK people, it will still cost you more than if you had a UK number - it just won't cost you more if you're calling them from France than if you're calling them from the UK.
2h + SMS only costs 2€/mo, where it used to be 16-25€ only two years ago ; and the full package (unlimited everything, with data bandwith capped after 3GB) 20€
Now if there's a country with even cheaper mobile plans... I'd like to see that
Anyway, for people who rather use internet than make phone calls, this can be a good deal indeed.
The reason operators are able to charge for roaming as they do, has a lot to do with the fact that the telecommunication business isn't a free business. Currently only a select few in each country who are paying a large licensing fee are allowed to set up the different types of networks (GSM, UMTS etc). What is happening is you grant special benefits to the operators, so they are working in a protected environment. Of course they are going to charge extra if no-one is there to bid lower.
What the EU is doing right now is trying to fix a symptom created by an already wacky system that their member states have created themselves.
If that is the disease that gives the symptom of roaming charges, then surely the cure is to eliminate the transaction costs of using local providers while you're in another EU country, in order to enable free-market competition between providers in different countries.
Which, er, is exactly what this proposal is suggesting... From the article: ""From 2014, customers would be able to keep costs down by selecting another provider for calls, texts and internet data services while travelling, if their own network charges extra for service abroad. They could do this without having to change their phone number or buy a new sim card."
That cure, for the symptom, is a bad thing for at least two reasons.
First, the actors in the environment needs to shift focus from improving their service and lowering price, to covering the lost revenue due to new legislation.
Second. The ones barred from taking part in this market (those that didn't get a license) are unable to improve customers services through participating in competition with lower prices, innovative new features etc.
That argument is sufficiently general that it applies to any measure that in some way reduces an actor's revenue, irrespective of whether that revenue loss is due to a greater or lesser free market. 'If the government stops subsidising lemonade stands €10 a day, they'll have to shift focus from improving their service and lowering price, to covering the lost revenue'.
In this case, the lost revenue is from having to compete with mobile operators in other countries in a single, common European market (a common market is the original and primary goal of the EU). So yes, they will lose revenue by having to compete in a free[1] market, rather than - as they do at the moment - taking advantage the fact the each country is effectively silo'd off in a separate market (from transaction costs) to avoid that competition. Cry me a river.
[1] well, free-er at least - I take your second point that it'll still be a ways from completely free.
TLDR: you're ironically using a fully general argument against government intervention to implicitly argue for less competition and a less free market (the status quo).
The reason it is wrong in the case of roaming is because you are imposing yet another regulation (not removing any). That means the actors doesn't have to shift focus towards acting in a freer market, but rather in a more restricted one.
If a ban on roaming prices was enacted worldwide do you think that would make for a more free market?
On the larger point, I'm fascinated by what seem to me to be the different instinctive reactions to proposals of supra-national common markets, free trade agreements, etc. by European-style 'classical-liberal' libertarians as opposed to the American brand of libertarianism.
The former generally support them, due to the benefits of having a single market - increased competition, reduced barriers to entry of other countries' markets, theories of comparative advantage, and so on. The latter, AFAICT, oppose them because they're Another Regulation which is Always Bad. Never mind that the purpose of the regulation is to remove 27 silo'd, anti-competitive, semi-protectionist national markets and replace it with a single European market.
You see the same split in discussions of anti-monopoly, anti-cartel etc. regulations - generally supported by European-style libertarians, with a view that competition is important in a free market and that may sometimes need government intervention to keep the market free, and opposed by American-style libertarians and corporatists on the grounds that government intervention should always be opposed.
Just like in pretty much every country in the world. Spectrum is a public resource, and not an infinite one. Every allocation given to a private company deprives society of other potential uses of that spectrum.
The EU communications market is already vastly more competitive than e.g. the US market in many areas, _thanks_ to extensive regulation to force unbundling of a lot of network and consumer services. This is about fixing some of the remaining problems, yes.
If anything, the regulation of the communications market in the EU is both one of the biggest successes in recent years, and one of the areas where EU decisions are most popular with EU citizens.
Then you divide the spectrum into chunks and sell 10 year licences to each one to the highest bidder. Problem solved, regulatory capture averted.
No matter what, telecos are going to lose out on the roaming cash cow.
I hope IP will replace all the other stuff eventually. If your abroad its relatively easy to find a Wifi and use Skype/Viber/WhatsApp, so we just need to get even more Wifi!
Seems to me like one of the goals of the new regime is to move at least a bit away from the (somewhat clumsy) regulatory approach of setting price controls, in favour of an approach of reducing transactional costs in order to enable free-market competition between providers in different countries.
Personally I think the same effect could be achieved by a much smaller intervention, namely decoupling billing from physical SIM cards. If it was possible to get the local (prepaid) rate without having to get a local SIM card (which, even in 2013, is often a somewhat difficult procedure, especially if you don't speak the local language), there would not only be no reason for roaming charges any more (just get a cheap prepaid rate and you are set), but there would also be more (not less) competition, because one could switch providers any time, even in his own country. The phone number, of course, should remain bound to the SIM card, just the billing should be "virtualized".
* Now (I think) part of Airtel.
O2 launched in UK Tu Go app which I find really great. It basically allows you to make and receive calls (and text messages) over wifi . Not only it is great if you have spotty reception at home, but you can use your phone whenever you find public wifi abroad.
This is demonstrably not the case with cell phone service providers.
Mobile telephony providers use deliberately confusing pricing to prevent price comparison. They use contract lock in to prevent customers switching contracts. They exploit the apathy and inertia of customers.
What would work in an ideal situation is not what would work with the situation we have. Tightly regulated, often government owned, communication networks are being deregulated, split off from those government owned companies, while expanding into new markets.
We need regulation to prevent incumbents from exploiting their government-subsidized position, and to protect naive users from themselves.
There are many providers now who don't require contracts. Every provider in the US has some sort of prepaid / no contract plan. The prices are much better than contract plans too, at least in the US.
> We need regulation to prevent incumbents from exploiting their government-subsidized position, and to protect naive users from themselves.
No, you highlighted one of the problems. The government needs to stop backing monopolies / oligopolies and allow competition to flourish. Government involvement always compounds itself. Subsidization and promotion requires regulation later to compensate for the lack of a free market.
In fact, a completely free market is an anarchy. So not only will you get monopolies and price fixing, you'll also get armed gangs that run around and steal your stuff.
That having said, regulation should be as minimal as possible, to avoid unwanted side effects, therefore I'm not convinced that regulating away roaming charges completely is the best approach - IMHO it would be better to just allow everyone to get local rates without having to change the SIM card (see my other post for details).
1) It's not a market – there are not enough competing companies. (Which is the case of network operators.)
2) Customers don't make optimal market decisions.
Due to other unnecessary government regulation. Regulations always have a snowball effect.
> 2) Customers don't make optimal market decisions.
That's the customer's problem, not the government's. It benefits customers who do make optimal decisions.
This is simply not true. If it was not regulated at all, the situation would be worse. This is an industry that has a natural tendency to become mono/oligo-polic. (Similarly to water supply inustry.)
> That's the customer's problem, not the government's. It benefits customers who do make optimal decisions.
That deserves a longer discussion but I'll try to sum it up. One example of a regulation that helps customers make better decisions is that misleading advertisment is banned. When I say regulation, I mean that the customers collectively decided that it would be better for everyone if misleading ads were banned. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this.
Most of the comments are from customers who feel overcharged by their providers, who have had a pretty free market in which to operate over the last number of decades.
Governments have no business dictating simple contractual agreements such as this
But they do have a business dictating that monopolies/oligopolies can't screw their customers, which is what is happening with roaming charges in Europe.
So long as governments allow adequate competition the markets will meet customer demands
See above, the operators have had many years to sort this out and have not. Your ideology seems to have run up against an edge case.
Did you even read the article? The whole point of the new regulations is to allow competition between providers of different countries in a common EU telecoms market (as opposed to the current situation where individual countries are effectively silo'd off). I'd love an explanation as to how exactly that's "anti free market".
Yeah, especially in the "market for lemons"....
Governments have always regulated phone service.