To start two posts in a week with 'Good Old EU' is totally unexpected. On Tuesday it was the EU's action in standardising mobile phone chargers, now it's bringing down the cost of phone calls and texting while abroad.
At this rate, the EU might start becoming popular. It's a far better way for it to spend its time than trying to specify dimensions for vegetables.
Sending a text from abroad in the EU will now cost 11 Euro-cents maximum, less than half the previous average of 29 Euro-cents. Receiving a text in another EU country remains free.
As from July 1st, mobile operators must also bill their customers for roaming calls by the second after the first 30 seconds, instead of on a per minute basis. This is expected to cut phone bills by more than 20%.
Charges for other roaming services - like sending an email or photo or surfing the internet - were capped at the wholesale level, i.e. to the rates one operator charges another - which is €1 per megabyte downloaded, compared with the previous average EU wholesale price of €1.68.
The cap will fall to 80 cents in 2010 and to 50 cents in 2011.
so as we see - markets do not work.
regulation (aka command & control) does.
Absolutely, Yank, look how shitty your wireless netwroks are over there - thanks to the market
....and why is this good?
As a consumer I don't like paying these charges BUT as an electronics engineer I quite like my customers to make good money. Then they might be able to afford building out more network infrastructure and buy some more chips....
Electronics is competing with every other sector of the economy for the consumer's cash, regulatory decisions which stop technology companies exploiting the lock-ins that they have disadvantage us with respect to other groups who are only too happy to do so and have better political connections.
I just got an e-mail advert for a DVB-T set top box for £14. I could buy four set top boxes for the price of one tank of diesel! If we don't find ways to control prices we will all have to move to India or China because we wont be able to afford living in the UK.
Engineers' remuneration is a topic I've never been able to figure out, Tom. Gordon Moore was able to make a $15 billion charitable gift so some engineers make money. If Vodafone made more money on its roaming charges, would they pay more for their ICs? I suspect they'd try and gouge their suppliers, however profitable their own business is. I suppose if you work designing DVDs you can't expect to make a lot becasue there's little margin to spread around; but if you design FPGAs and GPUs and high-earning analogue ICs and proprietary ICs for Apple you can probably make quite a bit.