Website launched to warn against cell charges

• A website launched today by the European Commission gives consumers advanced warning of sky-high mobile phone costs when travelling abroad.
• The move is designed to expose companies exploiting "international roaming" rates and steer phone users to the cheapest deals.
• National regulators as well as the Commission have been increasingly concerned about the high prices charged for "international roaming", which enables mobile phone subscribers to use their phones when abroad.
• Rates charged by service providers were described as "hard to believe" by EU Information Technology Commissioner Viviane Reding.
• She said: "Only a well-informed consumer is a well-armed consumer.
• At a time when we have seen in Europe so much progress in other telecommunications services, the cost of using your mobile phone abroad is hard to believe.
• The site does not list all the many thousands of roaming tariffs in the EU but sets out a sample of rates ravellers can expect to face in any of the 25 EU countries.
• To do this, a mobile network operator needs to conclude international roaming agreements with operators in other countries -- and the "foreign" part of the cost of the call has to be paid by the phone's owner rather than the caller.
• The inevitable complexities of the arrangement make it hard to keep track of how much each mobile call to home, or call received from home when abroad on a mobile, is costing.
• The charges for calling home on a mobile can vary hugely -- ten times as high calling from Malta to Poland with a Polish subscription as from Cyprus to Finland with a Finnish subscription.
• However, sample Commission figures show little or no difference calling the UK from Portugal, Malta, Spain or Italy on a UK subscription.