Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Vodafone; these are the five wireless operators that pretty much run the show over in Europe. The European Commission is said to be curious as to the kind of meetings these companies have had behind closed doors. Are they working together to artificially keep prices high? Are they planning and scheming on how to stop Apple from becoming such a dominate player? The world may never know. It should be noted that a formal investigation hasn’t officially started, but when the European Commission starts poking their head into matters like this, one should assume that they’re like a drug sniffing dog, desperately trying to find something suspicious. Now we’re huge fans of the work the European Commission has done in the past. They forced Microsoft to make a new version of Windows that gives people a choice of web browsers. They’ve also forced operators to cut the bullshit when it comes to roaming charges. More recently they came to the decision that countries should free up spectrum in the 800 MHz band by January 2013 so that the continent could be blanketed with 4G LTE.
So back to the question at hand, are these companies working together to price fix or at least reduce competition? We can only speculate, but you’ve got to think that they talk about their tariffs and compare how much a handset vendor like HTC is charging one operator versus another. Is that wrong? Ehhh, there’s probably a law against stuff like that, but we don’t think they’re taking said law seriously. The fact of the matter is that prices have actually been dropping in Europe, networks have been improving, and customers are generally happier with the state of wireless now compared to say four or five years ago.
[Via: The Verge]