Vodafone, the mobile telecoms operator, yesterday announced a new charging scheme for people who travel a lot and incur heavy roaming charges for using their mobile phones abroad.
The move comes after pressure from the European Commission, which is in the middle of an investigation into what it suspects are excessive roaming charges.
The scheme is not guaranteed to appease the Commission, particularly since it does not apply to all roaming customers, only those who are heavy users and so have an incentive to subscribe to a special price package.
The European Competition Commissioner, Mr Mario Monti, has promised he will announce the results of his inquiry, begun in 1999, "by the end of the year". The investigation gained pace in July 2001, when Commission officials raided the offices of various telecoms operators, including Vodafone, citing particular concerns about possible price-fixing and roaming charges in Germany and the UK.
Vodafone officials said yesterday they hoped the Commission could be persuaded not to make a retrospective judgment but to recognise that the market in roaming charges was now moving.
Deutsche Telecom announced a reduction in roaming charges in the summer. Vodafone said it would expect a further response from its competitors.
Under Vodafone's new scheme, Eurocall Platinum, customers would pay a monthly fee of €10, which would ensure them a maximum roaming rate of 65 cents per minute for calls made in western Europe. That compares with a maximum of 80 cents a minute under the current Eurocall scheme.
Vodafone's public policy director, Mr Richard Feasey, said technological advances were such that Vodafone now had the ability to connect customers to local partners in various countries. That ability gave Vodafone an incentive for price competition.
Traditionally, he said, roaming charges had been dictated by the wholesale prices levied between telecoms operators for carrying calls on each other's networks. And until recently, the choice of which operator a traveller logged onto in a foreign country had often been a matter a chance - or the strength of each operator's signal at an airport.
So a Vodafone customer might well be making calls on a non-Vodafone network, pushing up a competitor's traffic and income. But equally, Vodafone has been profiting from carrying the foreign calls of other operators. Mr Feasey estimated that roaming charges contributed "between 5 and 10 per cent" of profits, although he acknowledged they amounted to a smaller proportion of calls carried.
