For the second time in the span of a year, the European Commission will intervene in the mobile telephony market to trim costs for consumers and enhance competition.
After successfully implementing legislation to bring down international roaming charges last year, the Commission is now targeting "voice call termination rates". These are the wholesale tariffs charged by one operator to another when a customer of the first phones a customer of the second operator.
A study by the Commission revealed inconsistency in the EU market as mobile termination rates range from €0.02 per minute in Cyprus to over €0.18 per minute in Bulgaria. Also, they are nine times higher than fixed line termination rates, which, on average, cost €0.0057 per minute for local call termination.
Malta's charges, which stood at €10.55 per minute last October, are also considered high. The average charge in the EU 27 is €9.67 per minute.
The Commission said that through new EU regulations it expects that there would be greater consistency and coordination in order to bring the costs for mobile phone calls down by about 70 per cent from the current level.
"Disparate termination rates across the EU and large gaps between fixed and mobile termination rates are serious barriers to achieving a single European telecoms market that benefits competition and consumers," European Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding told journalists in Brussels.
"The consumer ends up paying for these gaps and so we need a regulatory plumber," she said.
Presenting a draft recommendation, which will be open for consultation until September, the Commission is suggesting the introduction of clear principles on which cost elements should be taken into account when national telecoms regulators determine termination rates, an efficient costing methodology, and symmetric regulation where the same price caps apply, within a country, to mobile and fixed operators.
The Commission is expected to issue the final text of its recommendation in October. Malta's voice call termination rates are set by the Malta Communication Authority.
In the coming weeks the Commission is also expected to propose new rules on SMS charges in order to force down the price of this technology.