According to a short article over at SMS Text News, it appears the EC Commissioner, Viviane Reding, has given all European mobile phone network operators two weeks in which to reduce their roaming SMS and data charges, or face regulation. Of course, if history repeats itself, the operators will huff and puff, reduce their rates a little and regulation will still be introduced to ensure the rates fall further. As a consumer, the price drops can only be a good thing; as an occasional traveller, I normally leave my phone switched off whilst abroad to minimise the cost; if the operators get these price reductions down far enough, many people will be more inclined to use their phones abroad, which of course will increase revenue even further. 3 are already pioneers in this field by offering “3 like home” on their own foreign networks, but they don’t have networks everywhere people travel to.

Of course, whether or not the operators reduce their rates in time for this Summer is also up for debate, but at least we should see rates start to drop at some point.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.