The European Commission will push ahead with totally eradicating mobile roaming fees and has already drawn up a piece of draft legislation, according to a leaked document.
The draft will be published next week, which is likely to cause some upset amongst operators, who have already expressed dismay at plans to cut roaming charges further. Claims that the European Commission had given up cutting charges appear to have been false.
Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, is leading the fight to create a single market for telecoms across 21 EU member states, hence the push to end additional charges for customers crossing borders.
Calls, texts and data are all covered in the plans, handed to the Guardian, meaning operators like Three, EE, O2 and Vodafone will have to charge the same costs where customers are in affected states.
The draft will be presented on 11 September and member states will meet to discuss the plans next month.
The proposed legislation would “guarantee common high levels of consumer protection across the union, including measures to gradually end mobile roaming surcharges”.
A Kroes spokesperson added: “We don’t give a running commentary on the proposals but we are committed to putting in place a method that pushes roaming out of the market.”
Earlier this week, Kroes told TechWeek she was pursuing the formation of a single market in various ways, including linking of European public sector clouds.
UK government IT heads had previously slammed the Commission for coming up with “restrictive” ideas about the cloud, but Kroes denied this to TechWeek, saying she welcomed all parties to the table to talk about how to create unified infrastructure across the continent.
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About time - its been one long rip off of customers and hold the EU's competiveness back. Its essential for a single market, and its virtually zero cost (maybe even a cost saving) to the operators.