EU to unveil new roaming price cap plans

The European Commission will unveil this week its plans to abolish any differences between domestic rates and mobile calls made abroad. The EC is expected to set a target date of 2015 when any differences between roaming and national telecom tariffs will be almost zero. According to unnamed sources cited by Reuters, the EC is thought to be considering lowering the cost of roaming voice calls in the EU to €0.24 per minute from July 2014, and eliminating them from mid-2016. Text messages will be capped at €0.10 until July 2016, compared with €0.11 today. While operators are expected to complain loudly at this move, accusing the EU of doing enormous damage to their revenues, the mobile messaging technology provider, Acision, believes caps could be beneficial to service providers. Article