The EU has ended the days of mobile roaming rip-offs

In the days when there were hundreds of mobile companies around the world, one could understand that each company paid the other for any calls and data use on the host’s network used by visiting customers and that this might lead to higher call charges.

But today many of Europe’s mobile operators are owned by one of a small number of groups. Locally they may act as separate companies but at the very top they’re part of a single pan-Europe group.

These groups use their presence in multiple countries to grab great prices from handset manufacturers and deliver savings and synergies for their shareholders, but until now the user has had no such benefit, instead they’re treated as they’ve always been – charged improbably high prices in an attempt to milk them for cash.

Of course this isn’t too surprising, the mobile industry has never really had the customer’s best interests at heart – long term contracts, better deals for new customers than existing, an ongoing refusal to apply tariff reductions to those already on a contract, all makie it clear just what mobile firms really think of the people who shop with them.

Well this may be about to change, in an unqualified victory for consumers, EU-wide caps on roaming call and text charges and data use have now been imposed, with data use now capped at at one euro per megabyte. That cap will decrease further over the next two years to €0.80 in 2010 and €0.50 in 2011.

There’s also good news on call and text charges:

“As of today, sending a text message from abroad in the EU costs a maximum €0.11, almost three times cheaper than the previous EU average of €0.28 (excl. VAT). To make a roamed call in another EU country must not cost more than €0.43 per minute, and no more than €0.19 to receive a call. From today, outgoing roaming calls will be charged by the second, after the first 30 seconds, rather than by the minute, and incoming calls will be charged by the second from the first second.”

Even more impressively, firms will have to protect users against unexpectedly large bills by imposing cut-off mechanism once the bill reaches €50, unless they choose another cut-off limit.

Many operators are already bleating about their profits, but don’t expect to see many senior executives taking a pay cut any time soon.

For more on the EU’s action visit their dedicated roaming micro-site