In recent weeks we have seen a number of EU MNOs receive warnings and threatened with fines for not following the EU Roaming Regulation for 2016. We have also seen last week an attempt for the European Commission to set price caps on Wholesale Rates. But what does the EU Roaming Regulation really mean for MNOs and what should we expect for June 2017.
All the press can talk about these last few days are the final Regulated Price Caps which have come into place across the EU member states. The Guardian Newspaper also expressed:
“Mobile phone users will now have to decide if it is worth their while paying extra for holiday roaming deals or bolt-ons”.
Of course the press isn’t focussed just on this years final price caps but on next years abolition of Roaming.
“Roaming fees in Europe get cheaper on April 30th before vanishing next year”
Says The Verge, and says the BBC…
“From June next year, roaming charges in the EU will be abolished completely.”
However as we heard from BEREC recently. The Roam Like At Home (RLAH) solutions in place across the EU today which claim the end of Roaming Charges are not what the Regulators consider to the be relevant for June 2017 when the full abolition of Roaming commences. While about half of the operators interviewed by BEREC replied that they offer some sort of RLAH tariff plan which includes roaming services in the domestic bundle, they have several restrictions: i.e. specific add-ons, specific services but not all under regulation, Specific durations etc. See our article on this here.
In light of this, MNOs have requested of ROCCO a research survey to capture data about common approaches to the EU Roaming Regulation 2015/2120. Please see below the link to this survey. Any MNO taking part will receive the full survey results at no cost for their own companies use.
EU MNOs can take the survey here
The Survey will run subject to the responses from MNOs and is expected to close on 12th July 2016. Thank you for participating.
We are also conducting Research into VoLTE at this time.
The survey is for all MNOs whether or not they have VoLTE today or not. The purpose of this Survey is to understand the current vision of MNO’s in terms of meeting the demands of the VoLTE service in Roaming and Interconnect scenarios.
VoLTE is on just about every MNOs minds these days. Our LTE Roaming Strategy Report 2015 told us that LTE was going to be big despite the challenges with roll-out, compatibility of Roaming Partners and IPX maturity. VoLTE was a major concern for MNOs within that report and in our IPX Networks Vendor Performance Report 2015 MNOs also indicated that when it comes to VoLTE there were still a lot of open questions.
As the market matures but still lacks a common direction, ROCCO has been interviewing MNOs who face these challenges and with their specific help has designed two new research studies which focus on extracting useful and important strategic information on where MNOs intend to go and how. This Research for MNOs will be followed tomorrow by research for IPX Vendors on VoLTE Roaming and Interconnect. Culminating in a single Market Intelligence Report.
The survey will take 8-10 minutes to complete. Mandatory questions are marked with an asterisk*.
All MNOs who take part will receive a special Executive Summary of the reports findings with key strategic information. The research is hosted and conducted by ROCCO.
