EU says 20% of roaming bill is overcharged

The European Commission may consider the implementation of rules that will force mobile telephone operators to abandon the rates on a per minute basis of roaming (cross-border) calls, after a study conducted by regulating authorities in the EU showed that consumers are overcharged by 20%. The rate for roaming calls is calculated per minute. Therefore, a 1-minute and 3 seconds call is billed as a two-minute call. "We are concerned that customers are being charged per minute instead of for the actual length of the call. (...) At a retail level, the difference between billed and actual minutes appears to be around 20%," according to a release published by the European Commission last week. In Romania, calls are billed per second, after the first minute of a call. How ever, it is not clear whether the 20% would apply locally, as well. The EC will announce at the end of this year whether it will also issue regulations to unify prices paid in EU countries for text messages (SMS) and for roaming Internet access, both of which are still high, and vary greatly from one member country to the next.