The European Commission has launched a new drive to cut the cost of using mobile phones across borders in Europe with plans to regulate the price of sending text messages while abroad.
Eager to build on the success last year of capping the price of voice calls in Europe, the commission wants to ensure that consumers do not pay too much for other services as well.
It has proposed legislation to limit the price of sending a text message, or SMS, from one EU country to another to no more than 11 cent. If approved by member states and the European Parliament, the cap would take effect on July 1 2009 and would exclude sales tax.
Currently, it costs 29 cent on average to send a text message across EU borders, which the commission considers to be unjustifiably high because sending a message domestically costs 10 times less on average.
The text message price cap was the main plank of a broader package that also aims to reduce the price for voice calls and surfing the internet over mobile phones.
On voice calls, the commission proposed to keep gradually lowering a cap on the price of cross-border calls in Europe until 2012 instead of 2010, as legislation introduced last year foresees.
The commission also proposed to require mobile operators to bill callers by the second after the first 30 seconds of a call between EU countries in a bid to clamp down on rounding up calls to the minute. It also wants consumers by 2010 to have the chance to set in advance limits on how much they can use their mobiles to surf the internet while abroad so that they do not get 'bill shocks' when they get back home.
'Using your mobile phone abroad in the EU should not cost unjustifiably more than at home, whether for making calls, sending texts or surfing the web,' said EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding.
