Press Release: Digital Agenda: Commission suspends discriminatory Danish SMS price regulation and starts an in-depth review

he Commission has written to the Danish telecoms regulator, Danish Business Authority (DBA), to express its serious doubts about the compatibility with EU law of DBA's proposed regulation of SMS termination rates, the rates mobile networks charge each other to deliver SMS between networks. DBA's proposal concerns the text messages sent to customers of the mobile virtual network operator Lycamobile (terminated on Lycamobile's network), which entered the Danish market in the first half of 2010.

The Commission is concerned that the price control DBA proposes might be discriminatory as it treats differently SMS coming from operators providing telecommunication services in Denmark. Such SMS are subject to (lower) price caps while SMS coming from operators providing telecommunication services in other Member States, are not regulated. The Commission, in close cooperation with the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) will, over the next three months discuss with DBA how to amend its proposal in order to make it compliant with EU law.