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Regulation of Roaming

The Regulation of Roaming
The European Commission’s decision to regulate roaming prices in 2007 appears to have been partly driven by the belief that mobile markets are uncompetitive and that consumers are unable to compare different offers effectively. In fact, rigorous competition between mobile operators has yielded rapid innovation, lower prices and a wide choice of different packages and services.

In 2008 the European Commission launched its public consultation for the review of the 2007 Roaming Regulations, which includes the potential extension of the regulation to data roaming.

The GSMA and its member operators believe that such price regulation is likely to be severely counterproductive, inhibiting the evolution of the market and potentially slowing down price reductions over the longer term.

We continue to support operators in Europe by:

• Developing lobbying positions against regulation
• Providing them with rigorous economic analysis, legal argumentation, price indexing to track market developments, creation of transparency websites, and lobbying and communications collateral
• Advocating that rigorous market analysis and impact assessments be undertaken as part of the policy process to fully understand the implications of any intervention.
  

Similar regulatory intervention has been proposed in other markets, including the Arab World. There, the GSMA has actively supported operators by leading an extensive lobbying campaign; as a result, the imposition of retail price caps on voice roaming has successfully been avoided.

Several GSMA papers and reports relating to the regulation of roaming are available for download.

Date	Document type	Title/hyperlink
October 2008	Briefing Paper	On the Impact Assessment accompanying the Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of The Council amending Regulation (EC) No 717/2007 on roaming on public mobile phone networks within the Community and Directive 2002/21/EC on a common regulatory framework for electronic communications networks and services
July 2008	Leaflet	GSMA Transparency Tracker English (40kb, pdf) French (40kb, pdf)
15th July 2008	Press release	GSMA Responds To European Commission Proposals To Regulate Roaming Costs For Text Messaging
2nd July 2008	Paper	GSM Association response to the public consultation for the Review of the functioning of the Regulation (EC) No 717/2007 (the "Roaming Regulation") and of its possible extension to SMS and data roaming services (1.33Mb, pdf)
24th June 2008	Leaflet	GSMA Data Roaming Tariff Tracker (176kb, pdf)
11th June 2008	Press release	EU Mobile Data Market Growing Rapidly Driven By Spread of Mobile Broadband
June 2008	Position paper	GSMA Paper European Data Roaming (308kb, pdf) GSMA Paper European Data Roaming - French (284kb, pdf)
June 2008	Position paper	GSMA Paper Demystifying the Mobile Industry English (1Mb, pdf) French (1.1Mb, pdf)
June 2008	Leaflet	SMS and Data Roaming Explained Document (802kb, pdf)

Visit the GSMA Transparency websites which provide detailed information on the best roaming tariffs in Europe and the Arab World.