Luxembourg, 13/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - National regulatory authorities may fix ex ante maximum prices for the transfer of a mobile telephone number from one mobile telephone operator to another, the European Court of Justice has stated in a press release on the case involving Mobistar against the Institut belge des services postaux et des télécommunications (IBPT).
The Belgian mobile telephony operator, Mobistar, had claimed that the costs fixed by the IBPT are too high. The Court of Appeal in Brussels, before which action had been brought, had referred a number of questions to the Court of Justice of the European Communities in relation to the interpretation of the so-called universal service directive of 7 March 2002, allowing for subscribers to change operators while keeping the same number.
IBPT fixes the set-up cost per mobile number successfully transferred from one operator to another on the basis of the “theoretical costs of an efficient mobile operator”. The donor operator may charge the recipient operator set-up costs in the amount set by the IBPT.
The set-up costs represent a large part of the costs which may be passed on directly or indirectly by the recipient operator to the subscriber who wishes to make use of the portability facility for his mobile number. Although such costs do not fall within the scope of the checks to be made by the national regulatory authorities, their fixing at excessive levels by donor operators might dissuade consumers from making use of the facility to change operator while retaining the same number, the Court states. The Directive, the Court adds, does not preclude the fixing of maximum prices for all mobile telephone operators by the national regulatory authorities in advance on the basis of an abstract model of all the costs.