Brussels, 07/07/2011 (Agence Europe) - Unsurprisingly, the European Consumers' Organisation (BEUC) is pleased with new proposals by the European Commission on roaming. According to Monique Goyens, the director general of BEUC, making a telephone call from abroad is often a “trap” for consumers, “due to the potentially sky-high costs and the dire lack of market choice (…). It's unjustifiable that data roaming can be 50 times more expensive than when at home.” BEUC described it as “reassuring” that the European Commission is tackling the market's structural problems by introducing decoupling of roaming from domestic telecommunications subscriptions, and is at last acting on the increasingly important issue of data roaming, but at the same time feels that placing a cap of 90 euro cents per MB on prices is a “slow start”. “Consumers should not be ripped off for surfing the net abroad”, Goyens concluded. It is no less of a surprise that the incumbent operators are not quite so keen on these proposals, which will eat into their profit margins. For example, the CEO of Portugal Telecom, Zeinal Bava, said that the proposals on competition matters were not well balanced. “There is more work to be done to make sure that the industry will not end up in 'survival mode'”. Franco Bernabè, the director general of Telecom Italia, is concerned that the Commission's proposals could end up hampering the development of European networks and that these will end up as nothing more than “pipelines” that will not evolve into “intelligent networks” capable of making the most of the latest technological developments. (I.L./transl.fl)