Eliminating Roaming Charges in E.U. is Only a Stopgap Measure Without Major Reforms
December 02, 2015
By Christopher Mohr
Contributing Writer
In spite of a recently passed law that will eliminate mobile roaming charges in Europe by June 2017, many feel that telecom costs will continue to remain high in the area. More changes will need to be made for real reform to occur and to satisfy skeptics that the new law will be anything more than a half-measure.
Mobile phone service in the United States is easy to take for granted. A summary of the major mobile service providers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint (News - Alert), and T-Mobile) shows that U.S. wireless roaming is free on each company’s nationwide wireless plans. If you never leave the U.S., it’s easy to take for granted how consumer-friendly these plans are. You could travel thousands of miles without facing roaming charges.
In Europe, which is comparable in size to the U.S. (including all 50 states), such care-free mobile use is not a given. According to A&B Groep, a Dutch telecom expense management firm, mobile phone service is still subject to a variety of carriers and political jurisdictions. Each one operates separately when it comes to billing for roaming.
The best way for a U.S. consumer to relate to this would be to imagine a different roaming plan for each state. This would be a nightmare for users in metro areas that cross state lines like New York or Kansas City.
On the surface it would appear that eliminating roaming charges would be a panacea, but as A&B Groep points out, carriers can simply increase other charges to make up for revenue lost by roaming charge elimination a year and a half from now.
Monique Goyens, the director general for the European Consumer Organization expressed similar skepticism in an interview with The Guardian:
“Another cost cut for mobile use abroad by April 2016 is good news, but is still only a half-baked solution. Allowing companies to limit roaming rights for frequent travelers, for example, is certainly not the promised end of roaming in Europe. A real zero-roaming Europe hinges on a major telecom market reform, which is a mammoth task to achieve in just 13 months.”
Providing free roaming across the U.S. was only possible once carriers entered into agreements with each other. In Europe, it will be much more complex, for the simple reason that more parties are involved, but the concept is the same: for the E.U. to have the same free roaming as the U.S. has, everyone is going to have to sit down and hash out agreements to make it happen. Until that happens, it seems likely that all the new roaming law has done is shift the burden of telecom expenses from travelers to domestic users.
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere