Europe’s mobile web access price caps are ‘set too high’

If you’re at home, you stay online via WiFi. If you’re at work, you’ve got your network to stay connected. And when you’re out and about or travelling, you’ve got mobile broadband. There’s no doubt that many people have chosen to go mobile. A recent study conducted by Cisco predicted that mobiles would  outnumber the world’s population by the year 2016. By this time, the human population would be at 7.3 billion, while mobiles will be surpassing the 10 million mark.

You’d expect that there would be a lot of players in this market, especially with the popularity of mobile. And while that might be true, it’s not just the number of competitors that will dictate pricing.

In this case, it’s in the hands of the rules of a governing body like the European Union. However, Three UK and several trade bodies are not very pleased about it. They’ve shared their views with communications minister Ed Vaizey, who they have urged to oppose a change to EU rules that will have travellers charged hundreds of pounds in order to browse the web from their mobile devices.

In an open letter to Vaizey, Three and the other appealing bodies wrote: “Using your mobile phone in Europe could still end up costing more than the trip itself.” Users who want to access the Internet on the go currently pay prices that are sky high, with some operators charging the equivalent of £3,000 for just 1GB (gigabyte) of data.

The European Union wants to set up price caps on what mobile operators can charge for these services and will last until 2022 once they are implemented. The caps will cut the costs to over £400 per gigabyte by 2014, but this is still hundreds of times more expensive than the retail price that users in the UK pay.

The letter continues: “Data usage on mobile devices is exploding and the commission’s proposals in their current form do not address the demand for data in 2012, never mind 2022. These price levels do not encourage competition and hence could put a brake on growth and competitiveness of EU as a whole.”