Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the review of the wholesale roaming market

Since 2006 the Commission has taken action to address the high roaming charges paid by consumers for using their mobile phones when travelling abroad in another EU Member State. Regulatory measures adopted by co-legislators in 2007, 2009 and 2012 introduced binding maximum retail and wholesale roaming charges.

The ultimate objective of these measures was to ensure that market forces would achieve a single market for mobile communication services in which no differentiation exists between national and roaming tariffs; accordingly, the Commission was required to verify whether the measures achieved this objective.

However, although wholesale and retail roaming charges decreased following the adoption of these measures, differences remained between roaming and national tariffs. For this reason, given that eliminating differentiation between national and roaming retail tariffs is an important part of an effective and functioning telecom single market, the Commission considered it necessary to take further measures to pursue this objective.

The elimination of roaming surcharges was reaffirmed as a general policy objective in the Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy which includes it as an important element for creating the right conditions for digital networks and services to flourish.

In 2015, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, which introduced the abolition of retail roaming surcharges in the Union from 15 June 2017, subject to fair usage of roaming services and allowing for the possibility for operators to apply for a derogation in exceptional cases where a roaming provider is not able to recover its overall actual and projected costs of providing regulated roaming services from its overall actual and projected revenues from the provision of such services. This new regulatory regime for retail roaming services in the Union is referred to as the ‘roam-like-at-home’ (RLAH) regime in this report.

However, Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 did not provide for measures on the wholesale roaming market, because additional investigation of market conditions was necessary. For the abolition of retail roaming surcharges to be sustainable throughout the EU, national wholesale roaming markets in the EU need to be competitive and to deliver wholesale roaming charges that enable operators to sustainably offer retail roaming services without any additional charges.

Since a wholesale roaming market functioning properly is a precondition for achieving the RLAH regime, the Roaming Regulation entrusted the Commission with the task of reviewing the wholesale roaming markets and making appropriate proposals to enable the abolition of retail roaming surcharges in the Union from 15 June 2017.

This report presents the results of the Commission’s wholesale roaming review. The report is accompanied by a legislative proposal to amend the Roaming Regulation. The details and underlying reasoning of this proposal can be found in the legislative proposal and associated impact assessment. The detailed methodology and results of the analysis of the functioning of wholesale roaming markets in support of this report can be found in the accompanying staff working document (SWD).

ESO: Background information: The review of national wholesale roaming markets and the Roaming Regulation http://www.europeansources.info/record/the-review-of-national-wholesale-roaming-markets-and-theroaming-regulation/

EUR-Lex: SWD(2016)200: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2016:200:FIN

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