BRUSSELS (AP) — Europeans are paying nearly two-thirds less for sending text messages when they are abroad as a new EU price cap entered into force Wednesday.
Phone users now pay a maximum of 11 euro cents (15 U.S. cents) for sending text messages from another European Union nation, down from an average cost of 28 euro cents.
The cost of calling home from the beach also goes down, with an existing price cap on "roaming" falling 43 euro cents per minute for making a call and 19 euro cents for receiving one. These prices do not include value-added tax, which varies in different EU countries.
Mobile Internet users could also see cheaper fees as the EU fixes a one-euro limit per megabyte on how much operators can charge each other to use their networks.
EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding urged operators to pass on these lower fees to customers and said regulators would check what fees they are charging next year to see if prices are coming down.
"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end," she said, two years after she first took on mobile phone operators, claiming they were charging tourists and business travelers excessive prices for calls when they are outside their home nation.
The EU's executive commission only moved against roaming charges for text messages and mobile Internet late last year — and set a new schedule for price caps on voice calls to drop by 2013.
The GSMA said earlier this year that it was unhappy with price regulation and hoped the price caps would expire — as intended — in mid-2012. They say regulation could hurt the new investments that have cut mobile prices by more than a third since 2004.
Text messages are wildly popular in Europe, especially among people under the age of 25. Some 2.5 billion were sent in 2007 at a total cost of €800 million.
The cost of sending a message from abroad varied widely in different nations. Latvians on vacation in Spain could pay as much as 70 euro cents per message, while Germans would pay just 32 euro cents to 37 euro cents.
Customers now also will be billed per second after the first 30 seconds of a call. Regulators had claimed that billing in one-minute increments meant customers were paying nearly a quarter more than they should.
Mobile Internet users also will get more warnings on how much data they are downloading to avoid unexpected "bill shocks" like a €46,000 charge for one German customer who downloaded a TV program in France.
Beginning next March, users can cap monthly data fees at €50. This will be the default limit for all users unless they choose another maximum.
Operators will have to warn customers when they have downloaded 80 percent of their agreed limit and tell them again when they've hit the limit and how they can keep on downloading if they want. If the customer doesn't respond, the roaming connection will be cut.