ANACOM has released its report on the implementation of the regulation on international roaming (roaming on public mobile telephone networks in the European Union (EU), which contains the results of Portugal versus the overall results of the EU, during the period between April 2007 and March 2008.
This Community legislation - Regulation (EC) no. 717/2007 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 June 2007 - sets out several requirements for companies providing the mobile telephone service, including most importantly:
- The provision by each provider company to all its customers of roaming; a Eurotariff - tariff applicable to all ''regulated calls'' (intra-community voice calls made or received on roaming ) whose price is capped in the regulation;
- Compliance with the annual price caps set out in the regulation for the average wholesale tariff that the operator of a visited mobile network may charge to the operator of the domestic mobile network operator of a roaming customer in respect of ''regulated calls'';
- Various obligations with the aim of increasing price transparency and improving the provision of information on tariffs to users of community roaming services.
The monitoring and supervision of compliance with the Regulation in the national territory of each Member State falls to the national regulatory authorities (NRA), which shall also monitor the evolution of wholesale and retail roaming tariffs for voice, SMS and data communications (including MMS) services, as well as situations of involuntary roaming in the border regions of neighbouring States and the possible use of traffic steering techniques used to the detriment of customers.
For this purpose, ANACOM has compiled information on this subject from national operators (firstly covering the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2007 and again covering the 4th quarter of 2007 and 1st quarter of 2008). In this context, ANACOM produced a report presenting the main results, in aggregated form, referring to the mobile operators of mobile telephone services that were in operation in Portugal during the quarters analysed (TMN, Vodafone, Sonaecom / Optimus and also, from the 4th quarter of 2007, the virtual mobile network operator CTT). The report also involves comparison of national results with the overall average results of all European operators, published in the latest report of the ERG (European Regulators Group) with reference to international roaming.
The ANACOM will release future updates of the results presented in the current report.
