[afp] The European Commission stepped up its offensive on mobile phone fees Thursday, calling for a clampdown on rates operators charge to connect to each other's networks.
The European Union's executive arm urged national regulators to ensure that such so-called termination rates are based on the real costs an efficient operator incurs for passing on a call from another operator.
Such rates vary widely among EU countries, from two euro cents per minute in Cyprus to 15 euro cents in Bulgaria with an average across the 27-nation European Union of 8.55 cents.
That works out to about nine times more than what it costs fixed-line operators to pass calls between each other's networks, much to the concern of the commission.
EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding said the situation benefited operators of big mobile phone networks because they had more incoming calls from fixed-line operators and smaller mobile operators.
"High mobile termination rates are ... an indirect subsidy for the larger mobile operators -- a subsidy that has to be paid by all fixed operators, by smaller mobile operators and by all consumers," she told a press conference.
"While there may have been a greater tolerance of high mobile termination rates when mobile networks were first being rolled out across Europe, they can no longer be justified today, at this advanced stage of mobile market development."
Concretely, the commission move consists of recommending national regulators to follow a set of principles when calculating a fair price for the cost of passing calls between operators
EU steps up offensive on mobile telephone fees
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