European Parliament Votes For Net Neutrality, Forbids Mobile Roaming Costs

First time accepted submitter TBerben (1061176) writes "The European Parliament has voted to accept the telecommunications reform bill. This bill simultaneously forbids mobile providers from charging roaming costs as of December 15, 2015 and guarantees net neutrality. Previous versions of the bill contained a much weaker definition of net neutrality, offering exemptions for 'specialized services,' but this was superseded in an amendment (original link, in Dutch) submitted by Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake (liberal fraction). Note that the legislation is not yet definitive: the Council of Ministers still has the deciding vote, but they are expected to follow the EP's vote."

Comments

Good, I guess

[Mr D from 63]

I'm big on NN, but I do admit there are good points made for market driven forces to allow buildup of delivery services. That breaks down with the lack of competition at the ISP level. I assume its similar in Europe as the US.

Riddle me this. If Netflix pays and ISP for delivering its content with quality...should not all subscribers to that ISP, regardless of what plan they signed up for, get Netflix at the highest possible bandwidth?

This issue can't be piecemeal-ed.

Re:Good, I guess

[91degrees]

Net Netrality is less of a problem in Europe. Our ISPs aren't nearly as monopolised as they seem to be in the US. To be honest, I'm not even sure that this is automatically a goood thing. I don't mind my Netflix getting a extra bandwidth, as long as this is bandwidth in addition to what everyone already gets. The problem is establishing whether the high payers are getting extra or everyone else is gettign a reuced service. There's no actually a difference; it just depends what you consider the baseline to be.

Re:Good, I guess

[ShanghaiBill]

I'm big on NN, but I do admit there are good points made for market driven forces to allow buildup of delivery services.

When each ISP is a local monopoly, then there is no market. If every home had a choice of a dozen ISPs, there would be no need for NN. NN is needed to prevent ISPs from abusing their monopoly power.

Re:Good, I guess

[91degrees]

Well, in Britain I had the choice of BT, Virgin, TalkTalk, Sky, Plusnet, Tesco, Clara.net and a whole load of others. So I don;t think any of them are local monopolies.

Re:Good, I guess

[smooth wombat]

Where I live in the U.S., I have two choices: Comcast or Verizon.

Both charge $75/month for 15/5 which is the package available.

You will this situation in many parts of the country where competition is defined as two companies charging the same high price for the same slow speeds.

Re:Good, I guess

[jalopezp]

The point of net neutrality is that net traffic is treated as a commodity. If service providers can choose which packets to give preferene, they not only compete on price and speed, they also compete on the shape of their packet preferences. This means competition moves from a commodity model to a monopolistically competitive one, which is less efficient. Granted, a duopoly is much less efficient, so it may be a moot point, but net neutrality is overall good, no matter how many ISPs there are.

Re:Good, I guess

[raju1kabir]

In the USA I believe the idea of the FCC forcing AT&T to wholesale its lines to competitors is completely alien?

It actually used to be the law of the land. During that period (around 2000) there was an incredibly vibrant broadband ISP scene. Unfortunately the FCC changed its mind (and no doubt a few briefcases full of cash changed hands) and now the situation has reverted to the anti-consumer oligopoly you see today.

Re:Good, I guess

[91degrees]

Which suggests things are the wrong way round :) Unless the wholesaler charges extra to the end company (e.g. Netflix) - and I don't think it's set up so that they can - competition in Europe should for the most part prevent this sort of problem. In the US there is no competition to speak of, nor is there any apparent plan to create any. That's where net neutrality is actually needed.

Re:Good, I guess

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

ISPs advertise, amd charge more for, higher speeds to your house.

It's fraud to deliberately degrade Netflix to attempt to extort from them a portion of what I pay Netflix.

Re:Good, I guess

[91degrees]

I may be wrong, but don't BT Wholesale just sell the chunk of connection between the home and the exchange? It would be difficult for BT to interfere with data rates on a per packet basis here. So there is actually competition even amongst the DSL providers,

Re:Good, I guess

[Chelloveck]

Then think about it reverse situation. I'm Amazon. We've been having a hard time getting traction for our streaming service; that lousy Netflix has the market locked up. We have all the bandwidth we need, so paying the ISP for more won't help. I know! We'll pay them to throttle Netflix's bandwidth!

Or, I'm Comcast. We own NBC, and their ratings suck rocks. So we'll give preferential treatment for subscribers who stream our properties, and throttle the speed of properties we don't own. And if people really want to watch other content we can charge them extra to remove the throttling. Call it the "Special SpeedBoost Streaming Package" and charge our subscribers $10/month extra for it.

Or, I'm Sony. Let's slip Comcast a little to make sure that PSN games have a higher network priority than XBone games. Et voila! See how much faster and smoother PlayStation is compared to XBox!

Re:Good, I guess

[Sockatume]

If Netflix gets its own servers installed at the ISP, that's an improved service, but my understanding is that operators want to do things like prioritise traffic to/from their favoured clients when the network is oversubscribed, which is double-dipping.

Re:Good, I guess

[WillAffleckUW]

Less efficient for theconsumer.

But more profitable for the Corporations that SCOTUS and Congress work for.

Re:Good, I guess

[morgauxo]

I don't think it's likely to be 'in addition to'. 'In addition to' requires building of infrastructure. Taking away from everyone else just requires a software tweak in the routers.

Re:Good, I guess

[Anonymice]

Correct. The exchanges are legally required to provide collocation services to other providers (I can't remember if "fair" fees are also regulated - I wouldn't be surprised), those companies then resell exchange access to third party ISPs (basically any ISP outside the "Big 6").
In all, it basically goes: BT manages the copper -> B2B ISP manages the PoP at the exchange -> Consumer ISP terminates the connection.

Re:Good, I guess

[Solandri]

I don't mind my Netflix getting a extra bandwidth, as long as this is bandwidth in addition to what everyone already gets. The problem is establishing whether the high payers are getting extra or everyone else is gettign a reuced service. There's no actually a difference; it just depends what you consider the baseline to be.

That's actually the crux of the matter. It's very difficult (if not impossible) to tell whether the ISP is using the money Netflix pays to buy extra bandwidth used for Netflix, or is just pocketing the money and simply reallocating bandwidth from elsewhere to Netflix thus degrading service for everyone else.

Net Neutrality just says, "since it's so hard to distinguish between those two cases, prevent the latter by prohibiting prioritization of one service over another."

Re:Good, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Roughly yes. There are two companies in the "BT Group" formed from the old British Telecom which are forbidden (according to the law at least, and there are people watching to some extent) from cross-subsidising. "BT Openreach" is a last-mile monopoly telephony company of the sort found in most of the Industrialised North. The law obliges it to sell any services it offers to resellers at regulated prices and it isn't allowed to deal with retail consumers directly. Then there's "BT Retail" which trades under the BT brand. It buys services from Openreach and brands them, markets them etc. to consumers and small businesses.

So for example say you order "Unlimited BT Infinity 2" having seen the TV adverts for this "high speed fibre broadband". BT Retail fills out forms asking BT Openreach to supply FTTC WBC product on your phone line. FTTC means there's fibre from the telephone exchange to a (typically green) street cabinet nearer you, that cabinet has a big VDSL2 modem in it, and the engineer also installs a consumer one in your home. VDSL2 can do 80Mbit/s if you're fairly close to the cabinet, although the cheapest FTTC product is rate-limited to 40Mbit/s. The IP traffic going from your home, to the cabinet, to the exchange, is transported by WBC (Wholesale Broadband Connect) to the nearest BT Retail Point of Presence, probably in a big city where they can buy IP transit cheaply. Every month you pay BT Retail for your "BT Infinity" service, and they pay some of it to BT Openreach to provide the actual FTTC WBC. If you instead bought "Unlimited Fibre 2" from Zen, a competitor of BT Retail, they would order _exactly the same_ service from Openreach, but the traffic goes to Zen's POP and you pay Zen.

In theory ISPs can intervene at the telephone exchange instead of purchasing Wholesale Broadband Connect, which is called "unbundling". This only works out to be economic for the bigger ISPs at the larger exchanges, so for much of the population it's WBC or nothing.

However, this approach doesn't leave that much to compete on. For example, more or less all UK ISPs offer fibre in either 40Mbit/s or 80Mbit/s because those are the two options from Openreach. Customer service is a differentiator (the cheapest ISPs tend to have bad customer service), and a few smaller ISPs offer IPv6 as well as IPv4 or offer IP multicasting. But other than that it's mostly fripperies, like ISP webmail, or free access to WiFi hotspots. There's no way for an ISP to deliver say 100Mbit/s fibre broadband before everybody else, because that would have to come from Openreach and be sold to all comers.

The UK cable TV network however is a straight forward monopoly. One company owns basically all the cable TV in the UK, and it sells the only Internet service using the cable TV cables. It's an alternative to BT, if you have it, which only cities and bigger towns tend to.

Re:Good, I guess

[HeckRuler]

Whoa there. Important nuance you're missing.

The internet is, was, and hopefully will operate with network neutrality in place. The networks interacted in a (mostly) neutral way when it came to exchanging data.

What you're talking about is legislature, rules, or regulation enforcing network neutrality.

It's far more accurate to say that if every home had a choice of a dozen ISPs, there would be no ISP that didn't operate under NN principles or else they would simply go out of business.

There have been a few examples of corporations trying to break network neutrality. ESPN360.com trying to hustle ISPs for money is one. ISPs trying to hustle Netflix for money is another. And they're rat bastards for doing so. But by and far we HAVE network neutrality. And we sure as shit want to keep it. Without it the Internet becomes significantly less awesome than it is today.

Re:Good, I guess

[Solandri]

I'm big on NN, but I do admit there are good points made for market driven forces to allow buildup of delivery services. That breaks down with the lack of competition at the ISP level. I assume its similar in Europe as the US.

It's not just lack of competition at the ISP level. Poorly thought out government-imposed standards can have the same effect too. When digital cell phone service rolled out, Europe mandated all carriers use GSM. GSM uses TDMA - it allocates a fixed timeslice to each user. During your phone's timeslice, the tower is yours and yours alone. This works fine for voice, since voice data has a fixed maximum bandwidth. But it becomes a real problem for data because you're wasting bandwidth by allocating it to phones which aren't actually using it during their timeslice.

The U.S. didn't mandate GSM. Consequently it ended up with both GSM and CDMA carriers. CDMA doesn't allocated a fixed bandwidth block to each phone. All phones are allowed to transmit simultaneously (each phone uses orthogonal codes which uniquely identify them), and their bandwidth is set by the noise floor (i.e. other phones' transmissions). So the bandwidth available to each phone automatically scales based on the number of phones communicating with the tower at any given time. If there are 20 phones transmitting or receiving, each gets 1/20th the bandwidth. If there's just one phone, it gets all the bandwidth.

So CDMA scales beautifully with number of phones, while GSM does not scale at all. Consequently the CDMA carriers were the first to roll out 2g service. There was no way to fix GSM for data. They had to add on a different standard for data, which most carriers implemented with CDMA or wideband CDMA. That's right, the HSDPA data service on most 3g GSM phones was actually CDMA. That's why you could browse the web and talk on a GSM phone at the same time - it had one TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones couldn't do that (unless they supported voice over IP) because they only had one CDMA radio for both.

CDMA was the better technology and it won the standards war. GSM was well-intentioned (I still think the SIM card idea is best for customers), but lack of foresight among the standard-makers could have hobbled the development of cellular data services. Fortunately the U.S. refused to require carriers use GSM, and instead let the market decide. Which it did, with CDMA emerging as the winner. (It's being replaced by LTE, which uses OFDMA - similar concept to CDMA but in the frequency domain instead of the code domain. It just requires more CPU power than CDMA, which wasn't possible on battery-limited mobile devices until recently. 802.11ac also uses OFDMA.)

For net neutrality though, I don't think this applies. We're not talking about how a service transmits its bits to an ISP. We're talking about what and how much the service transmits to the ISP. As long as the service is not transmitting more than the bandwidth the customer has paid for, there is no justification for throttling it. If the ISP has a problem with too many customers using a lot of bandwidth because of Netflix, that's something they need to take up with their customers, not with Netflix.

The ISP signed a contract with their customers agreeing to provide x Mbps of bandwidth. If they're unable to provide it at the price point they agreed to, that's between them and the customer. Netflix plays no role in it. In fact if the ISP wants to save on upstream bandwidth by having Netflix content hosted locally, they should have to pay Netflix for this privilege. The fact that the opposite is happening and Netflix is paying the ISPs is entirely an artifact of the monopoly these ISPs were given by their local governments.

Re:Good, I guess

[Rich0]

Interesting, thanks. However, I believe it is possible to do TDMA without dedicating particular frames to particular users.

Instead of a tower assigning a frame to a phone, the phone could randomly pick one. Some packets will get lost due to collisions. This is how ADS-B works.

However, it probably wouldn't scale nearly as well as CDMA, unless the frames are REALLY short so that there can be many of them (in which case overhead becomes a problem). If there are only 10 frames on a channel, then even a few phones will have collisions frequently, while with dedicated frame assignments there won't be any. With CDMA the spread-spectrum nature of things will result in just individual bits being lost and not entire frames, allowing error correction to work its magic.

Disclaimer, I'm hardly an expert in any of this, and know just enough about *DMA to be dangerous.

Re:Good, I guess

[realxmp]

Depends what kind of monopoly you mean, because of regulation, maybe not in a Network Neutrality kind of way but it's still a monopoly. All but one of those options above are going over BT's local loop and a lot of the smaller operators also buy their exchange hub backhaul from BT (Also Plusnet is BT). BT Openreach (the bare wires bit) is pretty much a local monopoly in most of the country and thus why they're so heavily regulated. It's pretty hard to say how they'd behave if they weren't, but you can bet if they had a choice they'd not be sharing that loop. Outside of the cities it is BT Wholesale that is most definitely a monopoly, the rural broadband project was pretty much a flop and all of the contracts went to BT. This means that the way BT Wholesale's price list is set up in turn sets the business model for anyone who buys bandwidth and lines from them.

Re:Good, I guess

[Ash-Fox]

everyone else uses BT wholesale services

Not true, See BE and Virgin.

Re:Good, I guess

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

So CDMA scales beautifully with number of phones, while GSM does not scale at all. Consequently the CDMA carriers were the first to roll out 2g service. There was no way to fix GSM for data. They had to add on a different standard for data, which most carriers implemented with CDMA or wideband CDMA. That's right, the HSDPA data service on most 3g GSM phones was actually CDMA. That's why you could browse the web and talk on a GSM phone at the same time - it had one TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones couldn't do that (unless they supported voice over IP) because they only had one CDMA radio for both.

As someone who developed GPRS for Ericsson back in the day, I don't even know where to start...

There were a number of different competing standards, in different parts of the world. That CDMA wasn't mandated in the US was not for lack of trying by the US manufacturers.

And, no, if we're talking about true packet data, i.e. not "phone modems", GSM/GPRS did emphatically not use a dedicated slot per user for data communication. Instead all the available "data" slots (and there can be many) were/are shared dynamically between all the users wanting to receive/transmit using dynamic reservation protocols (depending on, among other things, whether you have data to send/receive). Indeed EDGE is just GSM/GPRS with more data slots available, and with mobiles that can use more slots in sequence.

All this is moot anyway, as the explosion of demand for mobile IP, necessitated completely new systems anyway. And since they were new, they weren't hampered by what was already there. You say that UMTS is based on CDMA, which is true, but there are also FDMA and TDMA parts, and even versions of the UMTS protocols. So that UMTS is CDMA and that's superior to GSM which is TDMA does not follow.

I could write a book about the rest, but that'll have to do for now.

Cynicism

[Thanshin]

Option A : Mobile providers make less money next year.

Option B : Mobile providers raise the standard charges the exact necessary amount to avoid having losses due to this law.

Option C : Mobile providers raise the standard charges more than necessary and justify the raise saying ordinary people need to pay for the yuppies who roam Europe in their sports cars while chatting on their phones.

Re:Cynicism

[Anonymous Coward]

The mobile provides in much of Europe are in the mid of a race to the bottom for years, whoever raises charges will go bankrupt because everyone will just move to another carrier.

Re:Cynicism

[91degrees]

Option D: Mobile operators don't make significant losses because roaming charges are a pretty small chunk of their income, and it's offset by increased usage by travellers.

Re:Cynicism

[TheRaven64]

My mobile provider (3, in the UK) has started rolling out a thing that lets you use your inclusive minutes and data allowance in other countries without any extra charge (the costs if you go over those limits are pretty dire). It was actually cheaper for me to use data on my mobile when I visit the US than it was for the people I was visiting, on my last trip. I think they've seen the writing on the wall and started making these agreements long before they were needed. They're able to do this and charge 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text and 1p/MB for data (pre-pay - if you get a bundle and buy in bulk then things are cheaper, but the bundles are time limited).

Re:Cynicism

[angel'o'sphere]

Roaming causes no extra costs to the mobile providers (in europe) it only gives them unjustified extra money.

Re:Cynicism

[CRCulver]

Since pan-European operators like Orange or Vodaphone are actually made up of many individual companies registered at the national level, would the use of an Orange network in country A by a customer from country B not result in at least some added accounting expense, as these individual companies have to coordinate their records?

Re:Cynicism

[FireFury03]

Option B : Mobile providers raise the standard charges the exact necessary amount to avoid having losses due to this law.

Option C : Mobile providers raise the standard charges more than necessary and justify the raise saying ordinary people need to pay for the yuppies who roam Europe in their sports cars while chatting on their phones.

The rates are largely set by the market - if they could get away with raising their standard rates, don't you think they would have already done so?

Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges. As an example, on my PAYG contract I pay £0.01/MB while at home, but while on a trip to Canada earlier in the year it would've been £6/MB - *600 times the domestic charge*. The upshot was that I simply turned off 3G on my phone and didn't use it at all - zero profit for the MNO. If the charges had been more reasonable then I probably would've left it turned on and they would've made some money. Same goes for voice calls too. (FWIW, roaming charges within the EU have been regulated for some time and are much much lower anyway)

This is basically the EU saying "you've shown you can't be trusted to not take the piss, so we're taking our ball and going home".

Re:Cynicism

[91degrees]

Limit? What is this? My monthly cost is zero, and I get charged for phone calls. Where do you live where you're limited to how many calls you can make?

Re:Cynicism

[jalopezp]

Option D : More likely, large mobile providers in the more populous countries of the EU will stop making supranormal profits from corporate customers who travel for work, a hundred small operators from smaller countries will go bankrupt, and most others will merge or be acquired by a larger firm.

I'm not trying to be funny. It's very easy to switch mobile operators, and there are a lot of mobile operators, which makes it very unlikely that they can collude on high prices. Most likely there will be an shift in the industry's organizational landscape from country-wide four- or five-firm oligopolies into a more integrated continent-wide model. The largest obstacle for this to happen is that while no roaming charges may apply yet, we still have higher prices for international calls within the EU. These would need to go if we want to see a single market in Europe for mobile telephony, and to be honest, it should have happened years ago. Perhaps with the elimination of roaming charges the largest emerging mobile operators, who now have nothing to lose, will push for a single market.

Re:Cynicism

[jalopezp]

It will result in some added accounting expense for the companies. Part of the idea is to integrate the fragmented telephony market into a single Europe-wide one.

Re:Cynicism

[nospam007]

"would the use of an Orange network in country A by a customer from country B not result in at least some added accounting expense..."

About the same as a network in country B by a customer from country A.
The costs cancel each other out.

When they don't have to meter and bill the customers they'll have a net plus.

Re:Cynicism

[CRCulver]

The costs cancel each other out.

How do you know that? I think it is pretty obvious that, say, more customers from Orange Romania visit the territory of Orange France than vice-versa.

And this new legislation will change nothing of the way that operators are legally registered.

Re:Cynicism

[Anonymous Coward]

Roaming charges are not what you think they are then.

Roaming is the most highly profitable part of a mobile carrier's income, because not every carrier can cover every square kilometer with service. The difference with the EU, unlike the US, is that one carrier often can cover the entire country, but not the entire EU. Euro's are accustomed to owning multiple SIM cards in unlocked phones. In the US the only roaming that happens is between the US and Canada or the US and the Caribbean. While certainly some roaming happens between the US and Mexico, it's not part of the NANPA, so Mexico is actually considered "international" roaming while US/CA/Caribbean is considered national roaming.

All MVNO's operate on a wholesale cost which is a different price from roaming charges. If all roaming charges are eliminated, then MVNO's are put out of business, as there is no incentive to use a MVNO when it's cheaper to just use the carrier directly. To be fair, most MVNO's are prepaid carriers anyway, while most mobile carriers have their own prepaid brand. So it ultimately is a question of who benefits.

Canada recently told the carriers (who all collude to keep prices high) that roaming rates are to be capped. "The roaming rates that Canada's largest wireless companies are charging other domestic providers can be more than 10 times what they charge their own customers"

Ultimately I think this is what the EU solution is trying to solve as well.

Re:Cynicism

[bickerdyke]

Sorry, but that's the internal business of orange or Vodafone.

There WAS a reason, back when phone companies were indeed seperate companies, so the roaming costs were justified for those additional costs for both inter-company and inter-country accounting and banking.

But the EU did as much as they could to get rid of those additional costs for international business. A company (in ANY business down to a family plumbing business!) can now serve the whole of europe without worrying about different tax, costumer protection, safety, or pipe-gauge regulations. The even invented a whole new currency for a bunch of countries, just to make business easier.

At the same time, a wave of mergers hit the cellphone market with a few big players being active in every european country. ALSO to save money and getting rid of that internal accounting.

If they're still loosing money for "coordinating internal records", it's their own fault and nothing that would justify roaming charges.

Re:Cynicism

[TheDarkMaster]

Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges.

It is a very good option, but she has no place in current sociopathic way of thinking of corporations. Currently they only use the option that brings maximum profit in minimum time, no matter the consequences.

Re:Cynicism

[raju1kabir]

increased usage means more cost for the provider. How does that offset the income loss?

Let's say the carrier currently charges EUR 1/MB for a service that costs them EUR 0.02/MB to provide, and customers use 1 million megabytes. That's EUR 20,000 in costs and EUR 980,000 in profit.

Then they are forced to charge their domestic rate of EUR 0.10/MB for roaming data, and customers stop being stingy and use 20 million megabytes. That's EUR 400,000 in costs and EUR 1,600,000 in profit.

Obviously these numbers are plucked straight from my ass but surely you can see how it's possible. Roaming charges are almost pure profit as it is, and that's only possible because we're a captive market.

P.S. What is up with Slashdot still not being able to display the Euro symbol (â)? This is 2014, isn't it?

Re:Cynicism

[LQ]

Option C : Mobile providers raise the standard charges more than necessary and justify the raise saying ordinary people need to pay for the yuppies who roam Europe in their sports cars while chatting on their phones

Or low paid workers going abroad to find work can afford to phone home. Or workers who commute across borders don't have to turn their phones off.

Re:Cynicism

[Joce640k]

Dude, increased usage means more cost for the provider. How does that offset the income loss? Unless, of course, a subscriber goes over whatever BS limits the carrier has imposed?

Not really. It all evens out. If I'm abroad then I'm not connected to a cell tower in my home country.

Re:Cynicism

[Joce640k]

Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges.

This bill is about not having *any* roaming charges. You pay the same abroad as you do at home.

Re:Cynicism

[Sockatume]

They started out by offering free roaming onto the other "3" subsidiaries in other countries (which are actually different companies in the same parent group). I guess they noticed how this encouraged people to actually spend money while roaming.

Re:Cynicism

[jittles]

My mobile provider (3, in the UK) has started rolling out a thing that lets you use your inclusive minutes and data allowance in other countries without any extra charge (the costs if you go over those limits are pretty dire). It was actually cheaper for me to use data on my mobile when I visit the US than it was for the people I was visiting, on my last trip. I think they've seen the writing on the wall and started making these agreements long before they were needed. They're able to do this and charge 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text and 1p/MB for data (pre-pay - if you get a bundle and buy in bulk then things are cheaper, but the bundles are time limited).

Just got back from a trip out of the US. With T-mobile I had free text and data in three different countries but the cost for a voice call was $0.20 a minute. Of course, with free data, I could use my voip service to make calls at $0.01 per minute.

Re:Cynicism

[tsa]

Apparently it doesn't work that way or we would not have had roaming charges and the EU would not have to force them upon the providers.

Re:Cynicism

[Xrikcus]

Even roaming charges in countries not covered by that scheme are better. I maintain a 3 phone on a UK number even though I live in the US, partly because it's a way to keep the number I've had for 15 years, and partly because it is just cheaper to use in all countries other than the US. At the moment it's even cheaper to use IN the US if calling the UK, as you point out.

Re:Cynicism

[angel'o'sphere]

The accounting expenses will be exactly the same like they are right now.

Re:Cynicism

[j'vai]

aaah, that explains truphone's crazy charges in the central, south, & the carribeans..

this is wishful thinking in the dark, but i pray what's happening with this EU no roaming thingy ties with what's about to happen here in the US -

http://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-to-join-rural-operators-in-nationwide-roaming-hub/

if sprint & softbank can push the envelope on this thing, & offer more dual mode handsets, (with sprint lightening up on their unlocking policy on the gsm sim side of those hansets) just, maybe, we can join in on the fun..

Re:Cynicism

[raju1kabir]

Right, I forgot, markets invariably find optimal price points on their own, and regulation never helps anything. See you in church.

Re:Cynicism

[FireFury03]

Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges.

This bill is about not having *any* roaming charges. You pay the same abroad as you do at home.

Yes, so they will make some money from me when I'm abroad, just as they do when I'm at home. Compared to, at the moment, them making nothing from me while I'm abroad.

Re:Cynicism

[RightSaidFred99]

They should have a +0: Wishful thinking moderation.

If this were true, operators would have already stopped roaming charges because it's probably moderately expensive to track, bill, and maintain the infrastructure/software for it.

I love it when people try to pretend "government knows best, it will help businesses!". Of course this will cost them money, don't be silly. They'll have to make it up somewhere else.

Re:Cynicism

[RightSaidFred99]

You crack me up.

But you're right - the people who run these providers are _dumbasses_. They never thought of ending roaming charges as a way to _make_ money.

Lolzers.

Re:Cynicism

[rkww]

They never thought of ending roaming charges as a way to _make_ money

Except for Three UK who have already ended call roaming charges in eleven foreign countries - including the USA.

And for certain packages they've removed data roaming charges too (subject to limits.)

Incidentally 97 percent of their network traffic is data.

Re:Cynicism

[raju1kabir]

Your argument seems to require that every phone company is already making the most money that it possibly can. One wonders why they ever hire consultants or make any changes to management.

Re:Cynicism

[raju1kabir]

Ah, I see, you have to use the HTML entity rather than typing the character directly: €

That seems odd for a page that was sent with a UTF-8 character set indication in the headers. If you send the â character in the form it gets mangled, which is something I would have expected to happen on a site last updated in 1998, before anyone thought about encodings.

Re:Cynicism

[Anne Thwacks]

In the EU, the same operators operate in all the countries. It just they set up this scam in the olden days, when life was different. Nowadays, most sane people get a new SIM as they cross the boarder, and do their best not to make calls with the one from the previous country, leading to a massive reduction in potential revenue for the carriers.

The companies are run by a bunch of doped sloths who do not want to get their act together, even if it would benefit the shareholders as much as the customers, because they would have to get off their fat butts and manage some work.

The EU government spend all their time travelling between European countries (on our tab) and are well aware that they, personally, are the victims of this crap behaviour, and are in a position to defend consumers - cos they are the consumers most exposed.

Hint: politicians tend to act in their own best interests. Sometimes our interests just happen to coincide.

Re:Cynicism

[91degrees]

If this were true, operators would have already stopped roaming charges because it's probably moderately expensive to track, bill, and maintain the infrastructure/software for it.

The only way they could find out if this was true would be by taking the risk. Why would they do that if they are profitable? Executives in big companies are quite risk averse.

Of course this will cost them money, don't be silly. They'll have to make it up somewhere else.

It may well do so. My suggestion was speculation. But how will they make it up elsewhere? Their prices are presumably set at the rate where profit-per-customer x number of customers is optimised. If they could make more money by increasing prices they'd increase prices.

Re:Cynicism

[Joce640k]

But they'll make a lot less from the people who travel with company phones and don't give a damn about the phone bill.

Re:Cynicism

[rHBa]

As a Brit who lives in France I'm quite pleased about this proposal.

The cost of mobile tariffs in the UK is considerably less than in France but if I used a UK SIM card in France it would cost me more than having a French SIM.

If the UK operators had to charge me the same price to use my UK SIM card in France then I'd just get a UK SIM card and save money.

BTW, I'm not talking about international calls, I'm aware that these would still be expensive.

No more roaming charges ? Thats great !!

[arjun.jrao]

I live in India and here too, the roaming charges are exorbitant. Though there are only a handful of operators, I see no technical reason why roaming charges should exist (Similar to how SMS has no implicit cost to the telecom, but we are charged anyways). I can only dream of a day where such a law will be passed in my country *No roaming charges* *Weep with joy*

Re:No more roaming charges ? Thats great !!

[mgcarley]

Only a handful? There are 12 operators in India. Not MVNOs (which are technically illegal, although some are little more than additional brands established through Joint-Ventures with the bigger players, especially Tata) but operators with their own towers and licenses and all.

There used to be 14 before Etisalat and that other one (Spice?) shut up shop... and with Loop now having been acquired that'll bring it down to 11... but compare that to say, China (3) or Russia (4) or even the US (effectively 5 if we do not include MVNOs) so India has A LOT of choice.

And roaming charges are not exorbitant - paying under Rs1 per minute (close enough to US$0.01 that it doesn't matter) and the fact that you can easily switch to one of the many plans that allows you unlimited roaming to different states for under Rs100 (Rs62 to the $1 makes that less than $1.50 for a month) or in some cases even free -- OR if you're not from Mumbai or Delhi you can have service from BSNL and they have their IndiaOne tariff which gets rid of domestic roaming charges altogether... mobile services are some of the cheapest in the world. Even 3G back when it was released in India was about half the price (per GB) as compared to many developed countries, and prices have only gone down since then.

Roaming charge citations:
http://www.airtel.in/mobile/pr...
https://www.vodafone.in/prepai...

And even for international roaming, Vodafone has stuff like free incoming texts so if I'm out of the country I can receive an SMS about whatever and call back if it's urgent or write an email or Skype or whatever.

What costs a lot in India? Data. Yes on mobile (because it's mobile, this is somewhat expected) but more-so on wired connectivity - that was my big shocker when I first moved there, and why I do what I do.

Re:No more roaming charges ? Thats great !!

[mgcarley]

In any case, I do happen to agree that domestic roaming charges and charges for incoming calls are stupid.

Well, that does it

[NuAngel]

I'm moving to Europe. The real parts, not the Russian parts.

Re:Well, that does it

[johnsie]

The Argentinian economy is still a mess 15 years later. More than half the population there live in extreme poverty. You cannot blame the EU for the Irish and Greeks being irresponsible. That was their fault. They allowed it to happen. The people voted for governments who allowed it to happen. They took all the benefits and didn't pay attention to what was actually happening financially. Things would be alot worse if they, especially Ireland, hadn't received bailout money from EU countries. Greece were a wealthy country maybe a few thousand years ago, but they were pretty poor before this crisis and should never have borrowed such money. Going down the Argentina route wouldn't have helped in any way.

Re:Well, that does it

[Sique]

In a free country, everything the government does, can be spelled as "The goverment forbids...", because in a free country, everything is allowed except for the things that are explicitely forbidden.

Only if it was forbidden before, the government actually can allow something.

Re:Well, that does it

[Anonymous Coward]

The Greek government scammed Greece into the EMU with the assistance of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and numerous other banks. Financial products were developed which enabled the government of Greece to hide their borrowing.
Greek government-debt crisis

Greece was a third world country that posed as a first world one and got itself into all this trouble.
If the Greek government hadn't scammed Greece into the EMU it would have had its own currency and could have default on its debts.

Re:Well, that does it

[inasity_rules]

You must drive a Lada.

Re:Well, that does it

[Anonymous Coward]

A) Good thing
B) How does that even matter when someone would like to move to the EU?
C) So the Commissions proposed a law, and the Parliament made changes to that law to make things better for the EU-population. Seems to work great I'd say.
D) Greece, Spain, Portugal & Ireland went bankrupt because their national governments fucked things up. If the EU, ECB & IMF would not have gotten involved the economies of those countries would have been destroyed by speculants. The problem there was not enough control by the EU instead of too much control.
D) Monetary sovereingity of small countries like most in the EU means nothing in a globalised world. When the Euro was in problems, speculants tried to devalue it as much as possible for profit. Individual countries would have never been able to stand up to that.
E) In most countries ministers are also not democratically elected but are chosen from the members of the ruling parties, and are also the ones creating and changing laws.

Re:Well, that does it

[Anonymous Coward]

True Finns from Finland

Hello from Finland. The Perussuomalaiset (True Finns) are mainly an anti-brown-people-immigration party. They have never formulated a coherent policy on the EU in general, and support among the Finnish population for doing away with the euro, Erasmus, Schengen, labour mobility, etc. is extremely low even among True Finns voters (many of whom do not care for the party but want to send a message to the major parties which, they feel, have got too comfortable with the status quo).

Re:Well, that does it

[Arker]

"Yes, the net-neutrality principle is going to be very strong, if the Council will approve the same text as the Parliament. However, I don't think this is the most important thing for mankind."

It's certainly better than the alternative.

"What would have happened to the american economy without the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing?"

A market correction, liquidation of bad investments, and restructuring allowing for the economy to really grow again.

Unfortunately the EU equivalent is much more like the Fed than you give them credit for, however.

Re:Well, that does it

[Anonymous Coward]

D) Greece has been reduced to a third-world country because of EU's, ECB's and IMF's decisions. Even free vaccines have been cut. Spain, Portugal and Ireland are sharing a similar fate. Italy has also experienced a huge recession because of EU's policies.

That's just over-exaggerated. Having just come back from a week's holiday to Portgual and Spain (from the UK), their standard of living doesn't seem anywhere near a third-world country. The supermarkets stock exactly the same type of things as they do in France and here in the UK, the roads are well-maintained (both toll and non-toll), the hotels are absolutely fine, as are the (non touristy) places I went to visit. The only signs of a troubled ecoonmy that I saw were some abandoned house-building projects in the south of Spain. Aside from that, as a visitor you really wouldn't know those countries were having problems with their economies...

Re:Well, that does it

[Alioth]

Greece did it to themselves, but the EU in its breathless rush to get the Euro under way also decided to ignore the fact that Greece didn't qualify for the Euro under their own rules and let them in anyway. Greece being allowed into the Euro has caused Greece a lot of pain (and caused the eurozone plenty of problems).

Re:Well, that does it

[jonfr]

> D) Greece has been reduced to a third-world country because of EU's, ECB's and IMF's decisions. Even free vaccines have been cut. Spain, Portugal and Ireland are sharing a similar fate. Italy has also experienced a huge recession because of EU's policies.

Greece did this to them self. I also want to point out that health care related matters are not subject to EU rules or laws. Expect when it comes to travellers and tourists getting health care if they need to via the EU blue health card. As for Spain, Portugal and Ireland. They are all recovering. If you want to know why this happens you have to ask your bank (if it is an big international bank, but ask anyway if its your local bank. He may have taken part in this too).

Re:Well, that does it

[Too Much Noise]

The most stable currency on the planet is the swiss franc

Shows what you know - the Swiss National Bank has maintained for the last few years an official 1.20 peg on EURCHF, by not letting the CHF appreciate more than that wrt EUR. Quite a remarkable thing, considering all the speculator howling at the time the peg was announced, basically everyone and their dog predicting a broken peg in a matter of months.

Regardless, that makes the CHF pretty much as stable as the EUR, so maybe you should reconsider looking down your nose on the economic knowledge of McD assistants. Vanity is such a funny thing, wouldn't you agree?

Re:Well, that does it

[Ash-Fox]

Greece did it to themselves.

No, the European Union prevented Greece from resolving their situation by detatching from the Euro currency so they could have their own and devalue their currency (like Iceland did recently) - Now Iceland is thriving again, Greece is not.

When Greece attempted to do so, they removed the democratically elected leader and replaced him with a puppet. The country that brought democracy to the world...

Re:Well, that does it

[jonfr]

You do not know your history. Go look it up. EU has an history for almost 60 years as it currently stands (predecessor did go under other names).

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[TBerben]

Tourists either switch off their phones, or put them in flight mode, because of the exorbitant roaming charges they would otherwise make. I doubt they make up a significant portion of the operators' income. Your argument is easily reversed: the operators might experience an increase in revenue, once tourists actually start using their phones abroad.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[HetMes]

Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'll be interested in seeing what coverage tourist hotspots will have in the future.. The incumbent operators will have little or no incetive to build out their network capacity/coverage, since the need to upgrade capacity is mainly driven by tourists. Which they will not make much money off anymore.

Tell me something, are americans subject to roaming charges when going from California to Nevada ? Or Utah ? Or Arizona ? Or Florida ?
For the EU it's the same thing. Although we are not a federation, and telco companies still think in terms of nation states, one reason for the being of the EU was a common market. And in a common market you cannot have roaming charges just because you happen to go from France to Italy or Germany for example.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[FireFury03]

Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?

Yes, I would. Because oddly, when I'm on holiday I'm actually more interested in doing holiday type stuff than spending my time using the internet. Its useful *occasionally* (getting weather forecasts, etc.) but it's not a huge loss to not have it. Which is why I turn roaming data off on my phone when I go abroad and just use wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. on the occasions I want to use the internet.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[Zocalo]

That would be excellent if this happened, although unlikely given how much the local population that supports the tourist trade is likely to rely on that same mobile coverage. I go on vacation to *get away* from the daily grind, yet of late it has got to the point that you can't go anywhere without someone yakking on a mobile phone, and I go to some pretty out of the way places to try and make that happen. The absolute last thing you want to hear when you reach Everest Base Camp, slightly out of breath from the lack of oxygen and effort, and are just starting to take in the amazing view is:

*Latest naff ringtone*
"Hello...?"
*pause*
"Yes, I'm climbing Mount Everest!"

It kind of ruins the moment, you know?

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[91degrees]

While I largely agree, Google maps and translate can be pretty useful. And to a lesser degree, posting photos on social networks is nice, if not all that important.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[LQ]

Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?

I know this is /. but do you choose your holiday destination on the connectivity?

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[raju1kabir]

The incumbent operators will have little or no incetive to build out their network capacity/coverage, since the need to upgrade capacity is mainly driven by tourists.

What are you talking about? There is almost no place on earth where the majority of phone traffic comes from tourists. Maybe airports.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[Joce640k]

Tourists either switch off their phones, or put them in flight mode, because of the exorbitant roaming charges they would otherwise make. I doubt they make up a significant portion of the operators' income. Your argument is easily reversed: the operators might experience an increase in revenue, once tourists actually start using their phones abroad.

Yep.

This is karma for all the years they've been price-gouging people just because they cross a border for a few days.

And it serves them right.

A lot of them have been charging ridiculous amounts of money. Some of them even charge the recipient of the call as well as the caller - i.e. somebody calls you from a company account they don't pay the bill for and it costs you money to listen to them yakking for half an hour.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[Joce640k]

Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?

This bill covers the European Union, a bunch of geographically-close first world countries.

Internet coverage is usually better here than in the USA.

Where roaming fees come from

[Sockatume]

There's little actual cost involved in facilitating roaming. What happens is that every network charges the others high roaming charges, and nobody has any incentive to be the first one to drop and therefore lose the money.

Re:Where roaming fees come from

[Anne Thwacks]

Except that its exactly the same carriers in all the EU countries! They are charging themselves for these charges. Its complete bullshit.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[grahamm]

Or even worse when you do not even leave your home country but your phone happens to connect to a mast in a neighbouring country.

owning a truphone sim

[j'vai]

I wondered how this would affect their rates, then a google search produced -

http://www.bizjournals.com/triad/prnewswire/press_releases/North_Carolina/2014/04/02/LA96177

Cool for those that frequent travel over the pond often, but, for the carribeans, south, central americas, no love -

$1.71per min outgoing calls
$1.13per min incoming calls
$0.51per SMS
  $8.57per MB

If you're one who vacation frequently in these spots, & may have to overcome the language & time barriers upon stepping off the plane, the truphone sim, is good ONLY for a quick fast, until you can land a local prepaid sim, which may take & communicational effort..

I'm thinking at worst, in place such as St Martin, where the island is divided on ither side with cell provider coverage (I think digicel's trying to change that), the work hunting down & obtaining a prepaid sim when you switch sides from French to Dutch..

the roaming charges of carriers, are akin to interests charges of financial institutes..

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[Zebedeu]

Yes, I would. Because oddly, when I'm on holiday I'm actually more interested in doing holiday type stuff than spending my time using the internet.

I find I use the internet a lot more when I'm visiting some place than when I'm out and about in my own city - when I manage to find a convenient way to go online, which is rare.
This is because in my home city I don't need to check my maps to know where I'm going, I don't care as much about the weather since if the weather turns I can always find something else to do, I don't need translation services nor do I need to look for a decent restaurant as often, and I don't need to be checking for hotels since I have my comfy bed waiting for me.
I'm also a lot less active in social networks when I'm at home because there's a lot less interesting going on to justify posting.

I don't mean to say that I'm glued to my phone when I'm on vacation. In fact it's the reverse: I can optimize my time by searching for what I want more efficiently and get back to tourisming.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[FireFury03]

While I largely agree, Google maps and translate can be pretty useful. And to a lesser degree, posting photos on social networks is nice, if not all that important.

I've found that preloading your tablet / phone with openstreetmap maps works extremely well - I spent 2 weeks navigating around the Canadian rockies with Osmand running on a tablet and had no problems. Posting photos on social networks can probably wait until you're within range of a wifi hotspot.

Re:*you* would be surprised

[Alioth]

I wouldn't be after one of our managers managed to run up (without realising) a bill of nearly 2 grand's worth of roaming charges when they went to the UK. That was just their phone polling for email.

Actually

[ThatsNotPudding]

This is basically the EU saying "you've shown you can't be trusted to not take the piss, so we're taking your ball and going home".

FTFY

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[RotateLeftByte]

It does happen and sometimes the costs can be severe.

There is a small costal village in Kent that for a while had no UK mobile coverage. Instead they were connected to a French Carrier 22+ miles away. The uproar foced at least one UK carrier to put a basestation in the village. This ruling will eliminate the charges if you happen to connect to the french carrier

I've been in Basel on the Swiss side yet my mobile insists on connecting to one of the French networks. This ruling won't stop roaming charges if your phone is registered in Switzerland.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[houghi]

And also do not forget that many telco's in Europe opperate in differnt countries.
They even do not mind charging themselves as much as possible for interchange, so they can claim that the cost is real and that is the reason why they need to charge others at least as much.
That way they have an excuse to charge a high amount to the customer.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[GbrDead]

Everest Base Camp i not a "pretty out of the way place", IMHO.

Re:*you* would be surprised

[Freultwah]

There are limits to how large a bill you can run up with data roaming. Right now, the cap is at 50 euros per billing period. http://www.theguardian.com/mon...

Depends where you are.

[Chozabu]

last time I was in hull, there was only one choice.

Re:Touristy places will be in for a surprise..

[macinnisrr]

I live in Saskatchewan, Canada, and I get charged roaming if I go to another province. It sucks, and I hope we can pass similar legislation here.

Also Ban Mandatory TV Licensing

[Froggels]

It's nice to see Brussels actually making itself useful. Next they should work at banning mandatory TV licensing which is obnoxious and should not exist in the 21st century.