In a new twist in the roaming charges situation on Friday 9 September, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recalled the recent legislative proposal addressing the issue of permanent roaming and setting three months as the minimum period below which additional charges could not be made on consumers.
This turnabout can be partly explained by the strong reaction of consumer organisations and some in the media, accusing the Commission of going back on a commitment, endorsed by the joint legislators last year, to end roaming charges in Europe from June 2017.
“Let us be clear: there will be no more roaming charges from June 2017”, stated European Commission deputy chief spokesperson Alexander Winterstein. “We made a technical proposal which wasn’t bad but the president didn’t think it was good enough in view of the responses received through the response gathering mechanism. It has therefore been withdrawn and we will work on something better”, he said, indicating that a new proposal would made next week.
The draft implementing regulation that was presented on 5 September sought to prevent abuses such as, for example, where a consumer buys a SIM card in another member state in order to benefit from lower prices. The text stipulated that a customer who travels abroad for less than three months (90 days) per year should not be subject to additional charges from his/her telephone operator, on condition that he/she returns to the country where the subscription was taken out at least once per month. It proposed limits for any such surcharges (based on wholesale roaming: that is, 4 cents per minute for calls, 1 cent per SMS and 0.85 cent per megabit of data) and exempted cross-border workers who make daily use of the subscription taken out in their country of residence (see EUROPE 11616).
“The Commission is setting the bar too low (...) and thus is not ending roaming charges in the EU”, immediately responded Johannes Kleis of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC). The S&D and ALDE Groups in the European Parliament argued the same point, with the S&D going as far as to describe the proposal as “nonsense”. ETNO, the association of incumbent operators, took the opposite view, stating that the 90-day threshold went beyond what was necessary.
Speaking to the press on 9 September, Winterstein made the point that the average European travelled around 12 days per year, according to data from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), and that the 90-day ceiling that was initially proposed affected less than one per cent of the population. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)