The European Commission has been charged with setting the details of the fair-use policy and sustainability mechanism of the new roaming regulation. The former would allow operators to set a fair use amount of roaming in the EU, in order to avoid any abuse of the system, such as 'permanent roaming', where customers use in their home country Sims from other countries where national rates are cheaper. If a customer exceeds the fair-use amount, operators would be able to add extra charges for roaming.
The regulation employs the term 'periodic travel' for a reasonable amount of roaming, beyond which roaming could be considered abusive and a fair-use policy could apply. The consultation proposes a number of options for defining periodic travel, based on factors such as average paid holidays, working days and time spent abroad by EU residents. The consultation also looks at how the fair-use roaming should apply for customers on different types of domestic plans, such as fixed monthly allowances, unlimited plans and prepaid. No specific caps on the amount of 'roam like home' services were proposed yet in the consultation.
The sustainability mechanism gives operators another form of opt-out from the roaming rules, if they can prove they are unable to cover their costs without charging more for roaming than domestic services. National regulators will have the right to evaluate whether any surcharges are justified in such a case. Any extra fees would be limited to the amount needed to cover the operator's costs. The consultation looks at a variety of ways for determining the operator's costs, revenues and margins.
A third element of the public consultation will look at impact of the roaming changes on the functioning of wholesale roaming markets in the EU and whether the current price caps on wholesale roaming services need to be amended. Research by EU telecoms regulator Berec in 2014 found that in some countries, the EU's current wholesale price caps on data roaming are higher than actual retail prices, and average wholesale charges remain higher than domestic retail prices in many markets. The current roaming regulation requires the European Commission to review its impact by mid-2016, and Berec said the review will need to consider the impact on national markets of ending roaming charges and that operators in both home and visited markets can recover their costs.
According to the EC, the review of the wholesale market could lead to further legislative proposals. In the consultation, it raises the option of ending the wholesale price regulation or setting different wholesale price caps for each country depending on the local market conditions. The latter could be based on a common cost-based methodology, similar to that already used for termination rates across the EU.
The consultation is open for comment until 18 February 2016.
