The European Union's telecommunications minister plans to propose a new set of price controls that would sharply cut the roaming fees charged by mobile operators to send short text messages while also reducing the cost of surfing the Internet on a cell phone. Details of the proposal, obtained by the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or SMS, within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 U.S. cents, a message. That would be a 62 percent reduction from the current average of 29 cents, according to the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU. Reding also intends to recommend a cap on the wholesale cost of using mobile phones to access the Internet -- the fees operators charge each other -- that would halve the average cost to euro 1 a megabyte from euro 2. SMS roaming prices range from 6 cents in Estonia to 80 cents in Belgium, according to the European Regulators Group, a panel of the European Union's 27 national telecommunications regulators. "SMS prices are really too high so bringing them down is best thing that can happen for consumers," said Monique Goyens, the director general of the European Consumers' Organization, a Brussels group representing 41 consumer organizations in Europe. In 2007, Europeans spent euro 800 million in SMS roaming charges and euro 560 million on data roaming services, according to ...
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