EU's Reding plans to slash cost of text roaming

By Huw Jones

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - "Rip off" mobile phone operators will be forced to slash by roughly two-thirds the cost of sending a text message while travelling between European Union countries, the bloc’s executive arm said on Tuesday.

The 2.5 billion text messages sent every year by roaming customers in the EU cost over 10 times more than domestic short messages (SMS), EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

"EU citizens should be free to text across borders without being ripped off," she said.

After the "No" vote in the Irish referendum on the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty in June, Brussels is keen to show it has a role to play in the lives of the bloc’s 490 million citizens.

Price caps on roamed voice calls introduced last year by Reding were one of Brussels’ most popular policies ever.

Europe’s mobile industry "still hasn’t got the message that credible price reductions are needed to avoid regulation", Reding said.

"I will therefore recommend to my fellow commissioners that we propose a regulation of SMS roaming in October," Reding said.

Reding won full backing from the European Regulators Group of the bloc’s 27 national telecoms regulators.

A roamed text currently costs an average of 29 euro cents (46 .....continued below

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"In the view of the ERG, a price cap between euro 0.11 and euro 0.15 per SMS would be appropriate," Daniel Pataki, ERG chairman and head of the Hungarian National Communications Authority, said in a joint statement with Reding.

Reding told Reuters on Tuesday that her proposal would be at the lower end of that range. In February, she had given operators a retail target of 12 cents per roamed text.

Reding said the cost of surfing the Web using a mobile phone or laptop while travelling was also too high.

"We will also have to discuss in which way to address data roaming, which continues to be heavily overpriced," she said.

Mobile phone industry officials have said the price of roamed data and texts was falling fast while the voice roaming regulation introduced last year "has given consumers little benefit and stifled market growth".

(Editing by Dale Hudson)