Prospects for a unified European Union telecom market remain unsettled, though Neelie Kroes, Europe’s digital commissioner, wants to unify the EU telecom market by the spring of 2014, including provisions that would end all roaming charges across national borders within the EU.

One might argue that those sorts of provisions are the reasons mobile service providers will resist the call for a single telecom market, as most EU mobile service providers now are grappling with declining revenues caused in significant part by mandated lower wholesale roaming costs.

Whatever national regulators might think, mobile service providers are sure to resist moves that would place more immediate pressure on their revenue top lines.

The European Commission has already restricted how much operators in Europe can charge for roaming.

Existing price caps for one megabyte of data have fallen from around €5 to €0.70 ($6.54 to 92 U.S. cents), which drops to €0.45 in July and €0.20 a year later.

The EU goal has been to eliminate the difference between international and domestic tariffs by 2015. Kroes wants to move faster.

Vodafone (News - Alert), for example, says international roaming in Europe accounts for around 3 percent of group revenue. And you can assume profit margins are very high, as there is almost no cost to generate the roaming revenue.

Vodafone furthermore generates around 11 percent of group earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization from European roaming, according to Bernstein Research.

National regulators, on the other hand, might have issues of their own with ceding regulatory authority to the EU.

Network neutrality rules of some sort also are part of the package of changes Kroes wants the EU to adopt, and quickly.