Why the latest EU roaming price caps don't go far enough
The 10% cut in outbound roaming call prices will certainly help but as the 39% of us who make roaming calls well know, it will be a drop in the ocean relative to already very high costs. Especially as there is a distinct lack of help for mobile subscribers who might benefit from the large array of roaming bundles, bolt-ons and add-ons but simply forget or are not informed about their options.
It's particularly disappointing to see no per minute retail price cap on roaming data costs.Although customers have probably benefited from a £40 (€50) monthly price cap on roaming data, the current effective per minute cost for the average customer using roaming data is £2 per MB - that translates to £2 for just 5 minutes of web browsing or £24 per hour of mobile browsing.
As Kroes will know very well, cuts in wholesale price caps unfortunately do not always translate into lower costs to the customer. Roaming data remains an area of excessive profits for the networks. This is at the expense of around one quarter of mobile subscribers who use their phone to access the internet abroad.
In the last year, UK mobile subcribers made and received 2,17 billion minutes of roaming calls and used 219 Terabytes of roaming data. This is a significant chunk of network traffic and amounts to total customer spend of £1,23 billion per year.Given the large minority of users wanting to use their phone abroad and the volume of usage and spend, it's hardly surprising, though it remains frustrating, that networks are reluctant to lower their prices.
I would hope that the currently rather vague "comprehensive new proposals for long-term solutions to address the underlying problem of lack of competition in roaming markets" that Kroes intends to publish shortly will go further in trying to remedy the manifest customer pain experienced by many.I would certainly not recommend for anyone to see this as a "license to talk" more freely abroad. Roaming remains an unnecessarily expensive mobile spend category and we share the EU's vision (or, should I say, dream) that roaming costs will approach national calling costs by 2015.
All this being said, next week I'll be uncovering the "Truth about mobile roaming" - which will debunk some of the myths around mobile roaming (the third in our ongoing series of mobile mythbusting).
This will then be followed by a deeper article looking at some of the ways customers can reduce their roaming bills and some of the ways we hope roaming bills will decrease in years to come.
What do you think about the price caps? I want to hear what you think - do let me know. Are you excited, disappointed, apathetic, jaded by these announcements?
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