EU's Reding wants "credible" roaming cuts

By Niclas Mika

BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Mobile phone operators must act before July 1 to avoid the European Union imposing lower prices for texting or surfing the Web via mobile phones when abroad, the bloc's top telecoms regulator said on Monday.

Sending a text message or downloading data in another country should not be substantially more expensive than at home, Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding told reporters at the Mobile World Congress.

"Higher roaming charges abroad must be justified by additional costs of operators. If not, they will have to disappear," she said.

The GSM Association, an industry group, said consumers were already benefiting from competition and that it would resist any attempt to institute retail price regulation, as the EU did with voice roaming charges.

The 27-nation EU adopted a proposal from Reding last year to cut the cost of making and receiving voice calls outside a person's home country but the proposal did not include data and text messages.

Reding said sending a text message abroad should not be more expensive for consumers than at home plus the "very small marginal costs" for using a foreign network.

"Above this (price level), there is a clear conflict with the single market which I am not prepared to tolerate," Reding said.

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