Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-09-Speech-3-050-000"
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"en.20120509.17.3-050-000"2
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"Mr President, Mr Wammen, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I assume that each of you here in plenary has a smartphone and that you use them all the time, wherever you are – whether you are out and about at home, in your own country, or in Europe, whether you are on holiday or on business. We here in Parliament are by no means exceptional; our citizens are also permanently mobile and on the move in Europe. Our young people, in particular, are constantly online nowadays.
That is why I am particularly pleased that tomorrow, we will be able to adopt the Roaming III Regulation, as it is known, which will enter into force on 1 July 2012. In other words, just in time for the holiday season, we will be able to give our citizens the benefit of lower tariffs when they use smartphones in Europe. The future belongs to mobile devices. These days, everyone is mobile 24 hours a day. In recent years, there has been a huge increase in data transfer via smartphones in particular, and we will see further huge increases in the years ahead.
In contrast, the costs of using a mobile phone abroad are still extremely high; indeed, they have hardly come down at all. That is unacceptable. The charges must reflect reality. We cannot allow people using smartphones at home or in another European country to be charged many times what they have to pay at home for making calls, sending or receiving texts or downloading data. I can tell you that I am with a German provider, and at the beginning of this week, my provider informed me that I will have to pay EUR 8.20 if I download one megabyte of data here in Brussels. That is a complete rip-off, and we cannot allow it to continue.
What, then, will the new Roaming Regulation do? Its main aim is reduced charges for all our citizens. We hope to achieve this by creating greater competition in the roaming market in future. We are introducing maximum charges, and one particularly new element is a maximum retail charge for data transfer. The first maximum retail charge will take effect on 1 July 2012. In future, one megabyte will cost no more than EUR 0.70. The charges will be lowered further from 1 July 2013, when a maximum retail charge of EUR 0.45 per megabyte will come into force. The third price reduction will take effect on 1 July 2014, when the maximum charge will become EUR 0.20 per megabyte. We had to fight hard for these maximum retail charges in tough negotiations with the Council. I would like to extend my great thanks to my shadow rapporteurs and, in particular, to the rapporteur for the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, Robert Goebbels. Had we not fought so hard for better charges, then we would not be today where we hope to be after 1 July.
The market will also be opened up to new providers without a network of their own, in what is known as an open access solution. Moreover, from 1 July 2014, consumers will be able to choose roaming services from providers other than their national provider. This proposed solution is known as unbundling and, in future, European customers will also be able to use local services when travelling abroad – known as local break-out – by being able to choose the best offer from the various local operators, as is already the case for WLan access.
We have also introduced consumer protection rules. In future, these will apply not just within Europe, but also outside the European Union. The obligation to send a warning when users reach a certain tariff level, a certain level of charges, will also apply abroad. Other consumer protection rules have also been introduced in order to prevent involuntary roaming.
All in all, I can say that today is a good day for our citizens of Europe. I am pleased that from 1 July, charges will be reasonable, even for roaming."@en1
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