After months of negotiations and back and forts, the European Union has agreed to remove the roaming charges that users accumulate as they travel overseas, and instead adopt a “net neutrality” standpoint. The “trilogue” between member nations, the European Parliament, and the Commission finally decided that two years from now, mobile users can freely use their respective carrier services whenever they travel to other member countries, instead of paying a fortune on top of their regular monthly service fees.
The removal of the roaming charges will take effect by June 2017. But from now until then, there will be a cap on how much carriers can charge users. For mobile data, it will only be up to five cents per megabyte while it will be five cents per minute of calls, and two cents per SMS message. These are just stop gaps until the time when roaming charges will be totally removed. But it doesn’t mean users can go crazy using their data or calls and texts. They will also be subject to a a fair use policy, although the details of that have yet to be enumerated.
The three entities were also able to agree on the rules of “net neutrality”, which means that all internet traffic should be treated equally. Specialized services like streaming live TV will be seen as the same as browsing, as long as they will not hinder the use of other customers. This is a welcome break as compared to the stricter rules that we have in the US.
This agreement is the culmination of three years of negotiations between the parties, although the final agreement may be different from the original plan. They removed plans to harmonize the way carriers offer services in Europe, as it was probably too contentious. Bandwidths are sometimes considered national assets as it costs billions of euros, and so some member states would not want to tread on that. But otherwise, despite all the sometimes tense wrangling between parties involved, it was a pretty satisfactory result.
VIA: Fast FT
