European Commission waives roaming limits in new proposal

European Commissioner for the Digital Market, Andrus Ansip, has announced that no limits will be applied when roaming charges are abolished. Instead, a system of residence is used to prevent abuse.

Because there are no longer any time or volume limits on roaming, users should be able to use their telephone subscription in another EU country, just like in their home country, Ansip says. With this he says he wants to bring about an actual ‘roam like at home’ construction. However, providers must be able to intervene to prevent abuse. The abuse must be determined on the basis of the user’s place of residence. A ‘stable relationship’ with a member state could also be used for this purpose.

Ansip mentions some examples that can be seen as abuse. For example, a provider can address a user if he finds a significantly higher usage abroad than at home usage. A SIM card that has been inactive for a long time and is only used for roaming is also suspicious, according to the published press release. In addition, multiple SIM cards in the name of the same user, used one after the other while roaming, can lead to action by the provider. Another example is buying SIM cards in one country and using them in another.

In that case, the providers can contact the customer and impose costs if they indeed identify abuse. These costs are four cents per minute of calls, one cent per text message and 0.85 cents per MB of data usage. During the interview after the press conference, Ansip explains that people who, for example, travel a lot for their work do not abuse. These cases only arise when someone deliberately abuses the price differences between Member States. How providers should determine the difference was not discussed.

At the beginning of this month, the European Commission presented a proposal for a fair use policy to prevent abuse when abolishing roaming charges. However, it included limits on the number of days EU citizens could roam in other Member States. A few days later, however, the President of the Commission withdrew the proposal, because a ‘better’ proposal was possible.

The current new proposal is now being submitted to BEREC. It must then be adopted on December 15, so that roaming charges can be successfully abolished on June 15, 2017.