RSSEU looks to address cross-border texting charges
By Ed Oswald | Published July 15, 2008, 3:02 PM
Frustrated by lack of action among Europe's cellular carriers, the European Commission said Tuesday it would move to mandate lower prices for intra-European texting.
An average of €0.29 ($0.46 USD) is charged for messages, virtually unchanged since February when the EC first asked for a voluntary price drop at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Officials argued there that the higher pricing goes against the "borderless market" concept that European countries first started working towards a half-century ago. While fees are roughly equivalent to what the rest of the world pays while in the consumer's home country, it skyrockets when traveling through the rest of Europe.
For example, French consumers may pay as much as €0.30 ($0.48 USD), Germans €0.41 ($0.66 USD), a UK resident €0.63 ($1.01 USD), and a Belgian resident may pay as high as €0.80 ($1.28 USD).
Compare this to American carriers: T-Mobile charges 35 cents for each outgoing message and 15 cents or a text message from the feature bucket when texting from abroad. AT&T charges 50 cents per message sent and 20 cents per message received.
Given that comparison, the EC is calling the typical European texting fee a rip-off. "It is not a good sign for the competitiveness of Europe's mobile industry that it still hasn't got the message that credible price reductions are needed to avoid regulation," EC president José Manuel Barroso said.
"I will therefore recommend to my fellow Commissioners that we propose a regulation of SMS roaming in October," he continued, adding it would also look into lowering data roaming charges as well at that same meeting.
The target price being set by regulators is between 11 to 15 euro cents, which when translated to US dollars would essentially price this messages on par with domestic messaging here, which currently averages around 20 cents.
It will also press the industry publicly, having redesigned its Web site on the topic of roaming to include information on how each carrier charges for intra-European texts.
Regulators in Europe have taken a much more proactive approach to price regulation than their counterparts in the US. While the EU appears to already or be on the way to issuing edicts on pricing for mobile voice, data, and text usage, the US is only now beginning to look at the industry's pricing more closely.
Two issues that have already been bantered about in recent months are early termination fees, and carrier exclusivity deals with manufacturers over handsets -- the latter gaining steam following AT&T's signing of a deal with Apple over the iPhone.
So far, neither issue has resulted in any action at the federal level.
Text messaging is already one of the biggest ways that companies get inside our wallet. If you are going without a plan, the cost comes out to roughly $1,310USD per megabyte of data with a standard rate of $0.20 per text.
There is no reason people should be having to pay such an exorbitant price for an average of 160 bytes per message. Some people have become so dependent on it that the service providers have no qualms with raising the price every now and then.
For those wondering about the math... (Quoted from CrunchGear:) If 160 bytes of data costs twenty cents then 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of data would cost 131,072 cents, or $1,310.72.
That's just nuts. As carrier capacity increased, costs should go down instead of up.
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First its exorbitant...no, that's not fair...OK, OBSCENE roaming charges.
Now texting.
The EU huh? Unified in trade and currency. Sure, except they all want to retain their own identity and protect their own markets unless they feel they can get something for nothing from a neighbor.
The more it changes, the more it stays the same. LOL!
The only thing keeping cell phones so popular with so many friends over their, including several big wigs with 2 of the large international carriers sited there is the lack of landlines in much of Europe, and the complete inability of SO many to get any internet access at their home!
But they do have cell service.
If this were different, Skype would be eating the cell providers' lunch!
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You make it sound like we live in fields in the back end of no where!
They do charge a ridiculous amount tho! and woohoo the EU finally doing something half decent! i wonder what the catch is, we'll probably have to wear florescent jackets while using the phone now!
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