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Azerbaijan may slash roaming prices

08 October 2008 13:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vugar Mustafayev - APA-Economics. The cost of sending text messages abroad is set to fall by 60%, according to a European Commission proposal unveiled Tuesday which is aimed at combating the high cost of international texting and data downloading.
The proposed law will cap the price a consumer pays for a text message while traveling within the European Union at 11 euro cents, down from the current average of 29 euro cents. Meanwhile, the wholesale charges mobile operators are allowed to charge each other when passing on text messages will be limited to 4 euro cents.
Addressing the high costs of downloading data through a mobile phone while traveling, which the industry blames for the lack of take-up in the service, the commission wants to introduce a EUR1 per megabyte cap on the wholesale side, while allowing consumers to set their own maximum cost level before the service cuts out.
The EU will cap charges for roaming texts at a maximum of Â£0.09 and force operators to bill cross-border voice calls by the second.
Depending on political will in the other two Brussels institutions, the European Council and the European Parliament, which also have to vote on these proposals, the commission hopes the changes will become lawfully binding by July 2009.
The commission sees the price regulation as a necessary tool to create a single market in European telecoms. The market has historically been fragmented and ruled over by national regulators which many complained were too quick to side with the large state-owned telecom companies.
If implemented quickly, Europe should benefit from "tremendous growth in SMS and data services," said the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
In 2007, around 2.5 billion text messages were sent within the E.U., worth some EUR800 million, the commission says.
Azerbaijanâ€™s Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies told APA-Economics that the fees cut in Europe may also trim down prices in Azerbaijan in the future.
International calls cost $0.36 to $0.84 per minute in Azerbaijan depending on which operator it is. Sending an SMS costs about $0.9.