It’s finally done. As of 2 a.m. the EU has brokered a deal to ban all EU roaming charges by 2017. The deal is part of the Europe 2020 initiative and belongs to an effort entitled Connected Continent. The Latvians led this compromise among the council members during the course of an eight-hour work session.
Two years from now, roaming is officially dead in the EU. As of June 2017 all mobile phone calls, texts and mobile data will carry the same charges regardless of where they are within the EU. There will be an interim period in which operators can still levy charges for roaming, but they will be reduced by 75%. As of April 2016 roaming surcharges cannot exceed 6 cents per minute for voice calls, 2 cents per text message sent and 6 cents per megabyte of data used. Although the original regulator proposal would have been stricter on the European telecoms; at least the end goal has been reached.
Net neutrality was also a key topic of the meeting and an agreement was reached that will also become law in April. A “guaranteed open Internet” where all ISPs are required to treat traffic the same was the goal set forth by the member states. There are two key topics in that area called out in the final agreement.
First, “paid prioritization” of traffic will no longer be allowed. In other words, NetFlix can’t pay to have a higher priority than other traffic. But on the other hand, customers will have an opportunity to purchase “specialized series” where they can pay extra for certain Internet TV services to have a higher-quality connection as long as they do not impact the overall quality of the Internet traffic for the wider user base.
Second is the circumstances under which traffic can be blocked or have the speed reduced. This can only occur when it is in the public interest such as protection from a terrorist attack or stopping the spread of illegal content such as child pornography.
Although progress has already been made in the EU for daily travel plans providing a home country data package for only a few Euros per day; voice and text message charges are still too high to utilize as a normal course of action. I’m certainly looking forward to not having to think twice before using my smartphone when traveling in the not-too-distant future.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
