Under the agreement, roaming surcharges in the European Union will be abolished as of 15 June 2017.
However, roaming providers will be able to apply a ‘fair use policy’ to prevent abusive use of roaming. This would include using roaming services for purposes other than periodic travel.
Safeguards will be introduced to address the recovery of costs by operators.
Roaming fees will already go down on 30 April 2016, when the current retail caps will be replaced by a maximum surcharge of €0.05 per minute for calls, €0.02 for SMSs and €0.05 per megabyte for data.
Under the first EU-wide open internet rules, operators will have to treat all traffic equally when providing internet access services. They may use reasonable traffic management measures.
Blocking or throttling will be allowed only in a limited number of circumstances, for instance to counter cyber-attacks and prevent traffic congestion.
Agreements on services requiring a specific level of quality will be allowed, but operators will have to ensure the general quality of internet access services.
“This is a great success for the European Union and the Latvian presidency”, stressed Anrijs Matiss, the Latvian Minister for Transport and whose country is currently at the helm of the EU presidency.
“The Latvian presidency has put a lot of effort into finalising the Telecom Single Market proposal - we revived the proposal from scratch and reached agreement. This would not have been possible without the commitment and constructive approach of the member states, the European Parliament and the European Commission”.
This agreement comes almost two years after the European Commission put forward its proposal for a telecoms single market.
Welcoming the agreement Andrus Ansip, Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, said: “Europeans have been calling and waiting for the end of roaming charges as well as for net neutrality rules. They have been heard. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to create a Digital Single Market. Our plans to make it happen were fully endorsed by Heads of State and Government last week, and we should move faster than ever on this.”
For a decade, the Commission has continuously been working to decrease roaming charges within the EU. Prices for roaming calls, SMS and data have fallen by 80 percent since 2007 and data roaming is now up to 91 percent cheaper compared to 2007.
Consumers will pay the same price for calls, texts and mobile data wherever they are travelling in the EU.
Following the agreement, the text will have to be formally approved by the European Parliament and the Council. Then it will be translated into all EU languages. After that it will be published in the Official Journal and will officially enter into force.