Many have been shocked by the proposal from EU Telecoms commissioner, that would charge received calls too, as opposed to classic European mobile telephony customs. Many think, mistakenly, that his is a kind of compensatory will because of the decrease of roaming fees. The goal of Viviane Reding, however, is not at all to make network operators richer, but to cancel the mobile termination rate, applicable between operators, that limits the further decrease in fees. This would also create a much stronger competition on the market. In Europe, if someone calls from one network to another, he or she is charged by the foreign operator a call and minute fee, which is called mobile termination rate. Lately this rate has been decreased on many occasions, but unfortunately this always has been done after the intervention from the authorities, as no network operator would like to miss such an income. This fee, applied between operators, practically freezes the fee of a call made to another operator's network, as that cannot be cheaper than the mobile termination rate. On the whole, not even the rates applied in the popular flat-rate packages can be lower then the highest MTR.
Viviane Reding
Viviane Reding sees the opportunity of decreasing minute rates by applying the model successfully used in the United States and Singapore, where network operators charge no MTR, but in turn customers pay for received calls too, but the cost per minute is still much lower then in Europe. Although the idea of charging received calls might sound shocking, but this only means the division of call rates in two. This means that rates currently payed only by the caller, would be payed by both parties. The point of this system is that all network operators would gain income only from its own customers, and all settlements between each other would cease. The American model evidently prefers subscriptions, in which case network operators offer many thousand free minutes and free calls in the network every month at a very low price, but packages with an unlimited number of free minutes are also used. The unambiguous losers of this proposed model are the prepaid packages, where, in the lack of included minutes, the client has to pay after every received and dialed call, although due to the strong competition there is a possibility of including an unlimited number of calls in the network for prepared users too, in turn of a fixed monthly fee.
Translated by Szaszati
