EU leaders call for lower roaming charges
Bertie Ahern and other EU leaders today called for lower mobile phone charges for travellers who want to ring home from abroad.
“Roaming charges are not necessary. They are excessively costly,” Mr Ahern told reporters.
He said the rest of Europe should follow Ireland’s example in pressing mobile phone companies to cut – or even drop – charges.
The Taoiseach said he had convinced two Irish mobile phone companies to stop charging customers on both sides of the border after residents complained they had to pay up when their phone signal picked up a 'foreign' network - even though they hadn’t left home.
The European Commission has also blasted phone companies for charging “unjustifiably high” roaming charges, warning that it will on Tuesday put forward a law to force them to charge the same fee for using national and international networks.
The Commission last year launched a website to name and shame the companies who charge travellers huge fees to use a mobile phone outside of their country.
This site attracted more visitors than any other part of the Commission’s vast set of Internet pages for several weeks after the launch.
It showed Maltese customers are charged €12.70 for a four-minute phone call home from Latvia, while Finns pay just 14p extra to call from neighbouring Sweden.
The website was supposed to help consumers find the best deal by showing them costs charged in September 2005 by their home phone company and the network of the country they are visiting.
However, the website did not cover all phone networks because many companies did not post roaming tariffs online despite a promise from national phone associations that they would do so.
The EU head office highlighted Greece and Luxembourg as two countries where very little or no information was available to customers.
EU antitrust regulators started investigating “excessive” roaming prices in 2000, leading to charges against German and British phone companies for abusing their monopoly power. The cases are still ongoing.
