Ofcom bewails data roaming charges

Rating: GSMA points out they’re falling rapidly, anyway
by Tony Dennis

High data roaming charges within the EU are
hurting content providers given that it can cost almost three times as much to
download one megabyte’s worth of data abroad as opposed to in the UK.
Or so Ofcom’s Ed Richards is claiming. He calculates that it costs a typical
Brit subscriber £1.50 ($3) per megabyte at home compared to £4.10 ($8.20) when
roaming.
He’s therefore told a meeting of the ERG (European regulators Group) that
prices must drop as they’re hurting business competitiveness.

Richards’ criticism – as it turns out – is almost entirely unnecessary. For
starters the dust hasn’t settled over the imposition of the so-called ‘eurotariff’
in the first place.
A bunch of European operators have been given permission to take the matter to
the European Court of Justice. They’re challenging the legal mechanics of the
EU’s intervention but in essence they object to the EU Commissioner being able
to set retail prices.
According to Tom Phillips, head of public policy with the GSM Association, when
Viviane Reding set the eurotariff back in July 2007, she gave herself another
eighteen months to look at SMS and data roaming pricing, too.
More to the point, the ERG itself has published a pricing index that shows on an
annual basis data roaming charges across Europe fell by 40 per cent. "That’s
a pretty dramatic decrease," Phillips volunteered. "You’re also
likely to see a big drop in charges on a quarter by quarter basis.
The reason for these price drops is that data usage is rising very quickly
indeed, which enables operators to drop their prices as their own costs go
down."
As usual the GSMA argues that the mobile market is already very competitive –
with operators and subscribers moving very swiftly to flat rate tariffs. O2 dropped
its data charges by 40 per cent recently and Vodafone offers a Europe-wide data roaming tariff for £95 ($190) per month.

So, while data charges are still high, you could hardly argue that they’re
‘killing’ the fledgling mobile content industry.

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