EU Announces Deal To End All Wireless Roaming Charges (venturebeat.com)

The European Union took a big step toward creating a Digital Single Market today with the announcement of a deal that would end roaming charges for mobile consumers across the continent. From a report on VentureBeat: The plan had originally been announced two years ago when the European Commission unveiled an ambitious plan to create a DSM that would unify the continent's fractured rules around digital content, ecommerce, and mobile communications. However, the plan to end roaming charges across boarders ran into stiff opposition from telecom carriers worried about profits and consumers who were concerned about limits it imposed on data usage. As a result, the proposal appeared dead at one point last year. But negotiators said today they had reached an agreement on technical issues like sharing carrier costs across networks and a gradual phase-out of caps on data usage.

Comments

This, A million times this is what the U.S. needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Common Carrier all fiber, cable, cellular networks, everyone runs over the common carrier, no more fragmentation, no more limitations as all companies pay the same rate to run over the same equipment....

Of course this would end the gold-pressed-latinum mining that the Big 2 are doing right now.

No Limits Roaming = Lowest Common Denominator

[mutantSushi]

Issue here is with no limits, there is no reason you ever need to have plan with your (actual, functional) local provider. If costs in Denmark are high, because workers operating infrastructure need higher salary to live on, or Danish government happens to tax wireless more, you can sign up for plan in Romania whose costs are based on Romanian labor costs and tax structure, yet continue to actually use Danish infrastructure all the same. If taken far enough, Romanian carriers will have to raise their prices to account for their share of Danish infrastructure costs, but that means all Romanians would then be paying those costs (while still on lower Romanian salaries) while Danish tax and government budget is being undermined.

Normal people don't need "unlimited free international roaming", and it's easy enough to just get a local SIM card if you are travelling alot or for extended time, so there just is no broad basis for instituting this change which has broader repurcussions. If there were mass popular demand for it, carriers would already offer at least limited versions of it (potentially most popular in small countries or regions where travel to nearby countries is routine). This just smells of ideological neoliberalism.

Re:No Limits Roaming = Lowest Common Denominator

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...they do. Telia (and other operators using their network) offers what they call "Roam Like Home North" and "Roam Like Home Europe". Both services allow you to use your current subscription abroad, meaning if you have unlimited voice, you will have the same while roaming. The limitations are that data is capped to 10GB while roaming. "North" is limited to scandinavian and baltic countries, while "Europe" is limited to EU countries.

They don't cost insane either. You can have free voice and messages, 8gb data and north roaming for about 22USD/month and the european one (data is also increased to 15gb) for about 29USD/month.

Other networks are starting to offer similar services as well.

Re:Just one more thing

[AmiMoJo]

Our negotiating position is extremely weak.

We need the EU far more than they need us. 45% of our exports, 14% of theirs. We are in the position of having to do deals with people like Trump, and under a very tight timetable.

But the biggest problem we have is that we want the EU to give us something. The EU just wants to discourage is from doing something that will hurt us both, but we actually want them to change their usual rules and give us access to the common market under preferential terms.