During the 24th BEREC plenary meeting that took place on 1st -2nd October 2015 in Riga (Latvia), BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) approved a document called “IR Roaming BEREC Benchmark Data Report”.

This BEREC Benchmark Report on International Roaming presents the results of the 15th round of data collection on European international roaming services undertaken by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).

The Report covers the period 1 October 2014 – 31 March 2015.

Main Findings

According to BEREC, the collected information continues to show

“a good level of compliance with the Roaming Regulation in all EU Member States”

and

“At the retail level, all consumers have access to a Euro-voice, Euro-data and a Euro-SMS tariff”

As far as retail data roaming is concerned, those charts show what the average retail data price per Mb was in Q4 2014 and in Q1 2015, both for prepaid and postpaid customers.

The blue columns represent the Data Eurotariff (tariffs regulated through the current III Roaming Regulation) while the red columns show the Alternative Tariffs offered by Operators to their customers on an opt-in base.

We believe that it is really interesting to note that in several UE countries (i.e. Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, just to mention some) the average data roaming price per Mb is cheaper when the operator offers the Alternative Tariff rather than the Eurotariff.

It’s also interesting that, for example, in countries like Hungary or Italy,  the Alternative Tariff is much much cheaper than the Eurotariff… we believe that Hungarian and Italian customers must be delighted with this.

On the other way round, there are some countries such as Poland and Denmark where the Alternative Tariff costs much more: in Poland the Alternative Tariff for data is almost 10 times the Eurotariff!

Finally, there are some countries (i.e. Germany, Portugal and Ireland) where Eurotariff and Alternative Tariffs for data do not differ too much.

BEREC reports that

“The 2012 Regulation introduced new retail price caps for data services. This has led to a progressive drop in retail prices… There is a significant difference between the data Eurotariff and alternative tariffs for the relevant period: €0.053 in Q4 2014 and €0.052 in Q1 2015 for the Eurotariff compared to €0.105 and €0.090 for alternative tariffs.”

Federica Romano, Head of Legal & Regulation at ROCCO