EU Urges New Rules To Cut International Mobile Phone Roaming Costs

BRUSSELS (AP)--The European Commission wants new rules to stop mobile phone firms charging travelers a higher price for making calls abroad, European Union Telecommuications Commissioner Vivane Reding said Wednesday.

Companies have failed to obey warnings that the cost of using a foreign phone network - known as international roaming - is "unjustifiably high at the retail level," she said in remarks prepared for a speech to European telecommunications regulators in Paris.

"Prices seem to have remained essentially unchanged," she said. "Consumers continue to pay unreasonably high prices for using their mobile phone abroad."

She said the European Commission would publish a draft law in April and ask the E.U. to approve it as soon as possible.

"The new regulation will not prescribe a specific 'ideal' price for international roaming, but would require that international roaming charges are not higher than national roaming charges," she said.

The Commission last year launched a Web site to name and shame the companies who charge travelers huge fees to use a mobile phone outside of their country.

Reding said this site attracted more visitors than any other part of the Commission's vast set of Internet pages for several weeks after the launch.

The site showed Maltese customers are charged EUR12.70 ($15.15) for a four-minute phone call home from Latvia, while Finns pay just 20 euro cents extra to call from neighboring Sweden.

The Web site was supposed to help consumers find the best deal by showing them costs charged in September 2005 by their home phone company and the network of the country they are visiting.

However, the Web site didn't cover all phone networks because many companies didn't post roaming tariffs online despite a promise from national phone associations that they would do so.

The E.U. head office highlighted Greece and Luxembourg as two countries where very little or no information was available to customers.

E.U. antitrust regulators started investigating "excessive" roaming prices in 2000, leading to charges against German and U.K. phone companies of allegedly abusing their monopoly power. The cases are still ongoing.

Commission Web Site: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/roaming

(END) Dow Jones Newswires "

Posted to the site on 8th February 2006