Roaming charges for SMS messages and surfing the internet should be considerably cheaper after EU telecoms ministers approved a new price regime yesterday.

Meeting in Brussels for their Telecoms Council, the 27 EU member states agreed to cap prices of roaming mobile phone texts and data downloading as from next July. The proposal still needs the approval of the European Parliament but EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said she is very confident that MEPs will also give their go ahead soon.

The deal sets a retail price cap of €0.11 per roamed text, as opposed to the current EU average of €0.29.

The wholesale price on roamed data will be capped at €1 per downloaded megabyte. Ministers also supported Ms Reding's proposal to have roamed voice calls billed per second as from January 1 as part of a crackdown on operators which still charge their clients on a per minute basis.

The EU telecoms ministers also agreed to extend by three years to 2013 existing price caps on roamed voice calls.

Maltese mobile phone users should be affected positively because they are paying quite a high price to text from abroad. According to the Commission, Go Mobile customers are paying an average of €0.30 when texting from abroad while Vodafone clients pay an average €0.35 per SMS.

This is the second time that the EU has had to intervene to lower prices in the industry. In 2007, EU mobile operators were forced to cut charges for making and receiving calls abroad (voice roaming) by 60 per cent.

Malta was represented at yesterday's Council by Communications Minister Austin Gatt.