Thanks to the European Commission, today EU nations can jump for joy at reduced roaming prices. I’m not going to bother rephrasing this Reuters article, since these paragraphs sum up everything you need to know:
Operators will be allowed to charge customers a maximum of 11 euro cents per roamed SMS, excluding sales tax, compared with current prices of about 28 cents.
As of July 1, prices for making a roamed mobile call will be capped at 43 euro cents per minute versus 46 cents previously, and at 19 cents, down from 22 cents, for calls received abroad.
The caps will further fall to 39 cents for calls made and 15 cents for calls received while roaming from July 1, 2010 and to 35 cents and 11 cents from July 1, 2011.
Downloading data while roaming will cost a maximum of 1 euro per megabyte from Wednesday at the wholesale level compared with about 1.68 euros today.
Operators must also introduce per-second billing after 30 seconds for roamed calls made and from the first second for calls received abroad.
Thank you Viviane Reding!