| NOTAS: | A study prepared for the European Commission DG Communications Networks, Content & Technology by PwC and FUB
"The aim of this study is to develop an in-depth understanding of consumer practices and telecommunication offers by operators across a sample of 15 EU countries. To this end the study team endeavoured to calculate the cost of making three-minute domestic and intra-EU calls, both landline (fixed) and mobile, as well as the cost of sending 50 text messages (SMS) and multimedia messages (MMS). This was accomplished through data collection of tariffs offered by operators in August 2017. The study also collected evidence on trends in the telecom demand side market for a three-year period from 2012 to 2015. Evidence suggests that across the sample countries operators offer a variety of tariffs. In general, standard intra-EU calls are three times more expensive than domestic calls. At the same time telecom operators offer their consumers bundles and add-ons to reduce the cost of intra-EU calls – making the cost of an intra-EU call comparable with the cost of a standard domestic call. Very few operators distinguish between domestic calls and long-distance domestic calls (phone calls outside a defined local calling area) and only a few operators set their prices according to different time periods such as peak, off-peak and weekends. Furthermore operators group their zones destinations differently according to their particular pricing strategies, and as such the intra-EU price market is not harmonised. Only in a few countries the price of MMS remains competitive and few operators offer extra-tariffs for MMS. Despite an increase in mobile traffic in terms of absolute minutes of calls between 2012 and 2015, mobile market revenues in the same period show a downward trend. In the fixed market, revenues are also falling, whilst at the same time the usage of fixed voice telephony is declining." |
