EU sets timeline for single telecom market (opens in new tab)

Europe has already imposed increasingly more strict caps on roaming fees and many operators now offer a one-off fee per month for europe wide 'tariff transfer' to take your free included minutes with you as you travel - they get more from that fee than they do from roaming fees. This sounds like the final removal of roaming fees altogether - remember in Europe you do not pay to /receive/ calls in your home area unlike the US & Canada so it is a bit of an anomaly to have roaming fees for receiving calls when you move around the EU.

Of course, the roaming fees /outside/ Europe are now eye-watering.

I think you are confused ;)

They'll continue to charge roaming fees anyway, right up until they lose a lawsuit over it. Why would they do anything else?

I'm not an expert, But I'd imagine the opportunities for growth would override the desire to preserve revenue from roaming.

It differs a lot between different companies. Some have a LOT of roaming income, some not much at all.

Yup. 30MB for £15 a month! Wow, thanks Orange. >:(

No (see: Orange, Telefónica or Deutsche Telecom), but each operation will be its own entity with different regulations, different network and different numbering availability. Each country is its own market.

The goal here is apparently to have a single pan-european market, and allow cross-country organizations where e.g. O2 (Telefónica) would be the same O2 in every country where it has presence, without consumers having to pay for roaming and the like. An other goal is most likely cross-european number portability (e.g. moving from Italy to Slovenia, switching operator to a local slovenian one yet keeping the same number).

On the other hand, they also hint at a desire for US-type consolidations and this is pushed by big telco operators, that's extremely worrying.

There are some big ones like Vodafone, Orange, OTE, T-mobile, Telefonica, which operate in multiple countries, but I think even if you use Orange in one country, and go visit another country with Orange, you still pay for roaming, so I guess they are seen as different entities in each country and she wants the groups to be seen as single entities.

Hopefully this won't slow down competition like in US, and allow for price fixing.

Nope. UK have Orange, Italy have WIND. They are the same company, have the same branding - same everything - but it still costs me an arm and a leg to use my phone when I'm in Italy.

Yes for mobiles. Licences are sold by each state separately. If they were sold by a new EU institution, there would be EU-wide operators instead of state-wide ones.

Perhaps that 13 years of HD video data can fit in a petabyte?

> The shameless and outrageous sodomy of the consumer by every telco in every EU country

Speak for your country. I'm pretty happy with the competition in Finland.