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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bill contained a much weaker definition of net neutrality, offering exemptions for 'specialized services,' but this was superseded in an amendment (original link, in Dutch) submitted by Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake (liberal fraction).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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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".
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
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.
bickerdyke
Only if it was forbidden before, the government actually can allow something.
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?
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