Europeans are paying over £8.3bn a year in "spurious"
mobile termination charges.
The
European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA),
which looks after the regulatory and commercial interests of new
entrant telecoms operators, claims "lucrative" wholesale charges
imposed by incumbent mobile operators for connecting calls to each
other's networks are both "excessive and discriminatory".
As a result, it says, European consumers are being penalised.
The pro-competition group has called on the European Commission to
enforce a cut in these charges when it publishes proposals on
termination rates later this month.
ECTA says the current average EU mobile termination rate is 7.5p
a minute, although rates between member states and between networks
vary significantly.
The European Commission has previously said it wants to see
mobile termination rates cut to between 0.8p and 0.2p per minute by
2012.
ECTA believes current mobile termination charges are not based
on costs, and that they distort competition as they allow big
operators to offer their large customer bases calls within their
networks that do not attract termination charges - making it
difficult for smaller, fixed and mobile new entrant operators to
compete.
Innocenzo Genna, chairman of ECTA, said, "Customers have for
years faced excessive prices because of the very high termination
rates being charged when they make calls to mobile numbers. Our
estimate is that over the last ten years, across the 27 EU
countries, this amounts to a total in excess of £83.3bn of
consumers' money."