New date for the disappearance of roaming in the EU: June 15, 2017.

The Council of the European Union and the European Parliament have finally agreed on the abolition of mobile roaming surcharges in the EU as of June 15, 2017. The implementation of the measure has suffered several delays due to pressure from operators.

 

The agreement must be ratified by the governments of the 28 EU member states over the next six months, according to Efe news agency. This is an important step in the European plan to reform the telecommunications market. According to the agreement reached, the surcharges for calling, sending messages or surfing the Internet via mobile phone in a Member State other than the operator's home country should disappear by the aforementioned date.

However, it has been decided that operators will be able to apply a fair use policy to prevent abuse of roaming. This would refer, for example, to using roaming services for "purposes other than periodic travel". In parallel it has been agreed to introduce safeguards to cope with “cost recovery” which will involve ” not charging a surcharge for this service for operators.

The European institutions have been negotiating this new legislation for months, on which they have so far maintained different positions. The European Commission's initial proposal was to end roaming in 2016, considering that such surcharges did not make sense in the EU single market. Meanwhile, the European Parliament had called on December 15, 2015 to abolish those charges.

The countries had advocated a “pricing mechanism” that, as of June 30, 2016, would lower those rates. They proposed “certain limits” within which consumers could make and receive calls, send text messages and use data services without having to pay anything above their national rate. Instead, once that margin is exhausted, operators will be able to “charge a rate” that will be lower than the current one.

In the end, although roaming will beá banned in 2017, the institutions have decided as an intermediate step to lower roaming rates on April 30, 2016, when the wholesale price per minute should not exceed 0.05 euros for calls, 0.02 euros per SMS and 0.05 euros per megabyte of data (excluding VAT). A 75% reduction on current prices.

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