Brussels Aims for Sharper Cuts to Mobile Roaming Charges

BERLIN — The European Commission is proposing to extend and drastically lower Europe’s mobile phone roaming charges and wants to impose the first retail price controls on the use of the mobile Internet while traveling.

The draft of a plan devised by Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for telecommunications, would place the cap on voice roaming charges at 24 euro cents, or $0.34, a minute by July 1, 2014, from the current 39 cents.

The cap on the roaming charge for receiving a voice call would fall to 10 cents by 2014, while the cap on roaming for sending a text message would fall to 8 cents from 10 cents.

Roaming charges are imposed by mobile operators on customers who make or receive voice calls or surf the Internet in a foreign country within the European Union. The charges are in addition to normal calling tariffs.

The most controversial feature of the proposal by Mrs. Kroes is her plan to impose the first consumer price limits on roaming charges for using the Internet. There are currently no retail limits on so-called data roaming in Europe, and the average retail data roaming charge is €2.50 per downloaded megabyte, according to the commission’s report.

Under Mrs. Kroes’s plan, the first retail data cap would be set at 90 cents per megabyte starting July 1, 2012, and would be lowered to 70 cents in 2013 and to 50 cents starting July 1, 2014.

In recent speeches, Mrs. Kroes has been critical of Europe’s mobile operators, saying she saw no justification for the high roaming charges imposed on consumers, which has also deterred cross-border business development. With her proposal, Mrs. Kroes is taking a hard line with the industry, which is expected to fight to mitigate or block the new caps.

Besides setting new price limits, Mrs. Kroes is proposing two structural changes to the European wireless market that could further dramatically lower consumer roaming charges. Her plan would require European mobile operators to sell wholesale roaming services at reasonable prices to virtual resellers called Mobile Virtual Network Operators.

Currently, most wireless operators refuse to sell such services to potential rivals. The resellers, which typically don’t own their own networks, would be able to sell discounted roaming packages directly to consumers.

Mrs. Kroes is also proposing that European mobile consumers have the legal right to buy roaming services separately from a different operator than their existing wireless operator.

The plan aims to create a separate, second market in roaming services, which would further lower charges.

Mrs. Kroes plans to present details of the commission’s plan on June 22 in Brussels. The plan would require the approval of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers in a process not likely to be completed until spring 2012.

Retail price caps on voice and text message roaming were first imposed in Europe in July 2007, with the caps falling automatically each year. But the reductions have not been extended to mobile data, where lawmakers initially imposed only a wholesale cap regulating the prices operators charge each other for use of their networks.

But those savings have not been passed on to consumers. While the average wholesale data roaming charge is 50 cents per megabyte, the retail price paid by consumers is five times that amount. Last year, amid a rash of consumer complaints of price gouging by operators, lawmakers limited the maximum monthly charge that a European consumer could pay for data roaming to €50.

But at the expensive per megabyte being charged, the limit is typically reached within a few days of normal Internet use, and operators then slow Internet download service significantly for the remainder of the month.