EU Data Costs 'Seriously Harming' Content Market

Three parent Hutchison Whampoa is calling for roaming data charges to be lowered across Europe. It said it had reached a million mobile broadband subscribers across the continent but is being stifled by high costs.

European telecoms director Christian Salbaing: "Consumers are rightly fearful of the excessive charges faced when they roam off our networks. Some networks are charging the equivalent of ?12 to watch a three minute YouTube clip or up to ?180 to download an hour of television, this could inflict serious harm on a growing market.

"Typical retail roaming prices are literally hundreds of times what customers expect to pay domestically. A European consumer might pay around one euro cent per megabyte at home, yet pay a premium of 360 times that simply to cross a border."

Europe's telecoms commissioner Vivianne Reding had threatened to cap cross-border data and SMS charges this month if carriers couldn't lower prices. Bt her director-general Fabio Colasanti backed out of that last week, arguingdatais a less mature market than SMS, instead calling for greater price transparency so that the ball is in consumers' court on bill shock. Reding capped voice roaming charges last year, just in time for Europeans' summer vacations.

But Salbaing disagrees that the mobile web is still immature: "Mobile broadband is already a mass market proposition." As evidence of what cost cuts could do, he said Three's 3 Like Home tariff, which lets subscribers use their domestic rate abroad, had resulted in roaming data volumes increasing 2,500 percent in the last year. Three, KPN, BASE, E-Plus and Play in February agreed to a wholesale rate of 25 euro cents ($0.36) per megabyte.

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