Brussels (ip-192.com): Europeans can look again to their smart phones with a smile: Outrageous rooming charges could be on their way down. A new Europe-wide bill to prevent mobile phone users from accumulating large bills for surfing the net or checking their e-mail via their handset is in force now.
Customers can now request that their carrier cuts them off when a preset limit is reached. If users do not set a limit by 1 July, it will automatically be set at 50 Euros (about $68). "Protection against data roaming bill shocks is a useful step towards building customers' confidence to use mobile networks to surf the internet when traveling around Europe," Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda. "Such confidence is essential if people and businesses are to use the internet to its full potential."
From now on, national regulators will deal with customer complaints and impose sanctions if carriers don’t honor preset spending limits. The European Commission did publish two examples of charges phone carriers tried collect: a German traveler was hit with a 46,000 Euros (about $62,500) bill for downloading a TV program while traveling in France, and a British student was billed 9,000 Euros ($12,225) for a month's studying abroad.
The new rules are expected to help reduce bills generally. The price that operators pay each other per megabyte downloaded has been limited to a safeguard level of 1 Euro ($1.36) per MB, and will fall over the next two years, says the EU. The price for sending a text message is now capped at 0.11 Euro ($0.15). There is a new maximum tariff of 0.43 Euros ($0.58) for making a phone call and 0.19 Euros ($0.26) for receiving one, and operators must use per second billing after the first 30 seconds for calls made and immediately for calls received.
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