­A meeting of Government Ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has agreed to work on cutting mobile roaming rates between their countries.

The GCC Ministers decided to adhere to the Ministerial resolution made at a meeting three years ago, which stated that the GCC countries will move the implementation of proposals from a working group for a 30% cut in roaming rates.

In a statement, the GCC Telecommunications Regulatory Authorities said that they will inform the operators immediately after the meeting to implement the resolution. The GCC is a political and economic union of the Arab states constituting the Arabian Peninsula, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

Source: Cellular News

­A new report from Tariff Consultancy (TCL) says that voice and SMS roaming rates in Europe have halved between 2007 to 2010 due to an EU roaming price cap - but with very few prices applied below the cap. EU mobile roaming data rates are on average 5.4 euro, 5 times the 1 Euro per MB wholesale rate though individual operator data roaming rates vary from below the wholesale cap to more than 10 times the cap rate.

Increasingly though mobile operators push a series of separate "opt in" roaming bundles for consumers that bypass the EU roaming cap which offer roaming discounts in return for a weekly or monthly fee to selected holiday destinations but can attract higher rates to EU countries than the EC rate cap.The net effect of the rebalancing of mobile roaming tariffs outside of the EU has been to make roaming services to the US or other countries relatively expensive by comparison with the EU.

For example:

- The price of a roaming voice call from the EU zone to the next geographical tariff zone has an average mark up of 200%

- The price of SMS roaming outside the EU zone to the next geographical zone has an average mark up of 160%.

- The price of Mobile Data roaming outside the EU zone to the next geographical zone has an average mark up of 270%.

Source: Cellular News

Vodafone Greece, has introduced a new roaming service dubbed as Vodafone Europe.  The offer comprises of the Vodafone Europe Voice or Vodafone Europe Data subscriptions. Priced at EUR 18 per month, the package offers national rates for outgoing calls from EU to Vodafone networks in 11 countries in the EU as well as for international calls from Greece to EU networks. Moreover, receiving calls in Vodafone networks is free.  Vodafone Europe Data is priced at EUR 70 per month and offers 1 GB of data transfer in Greece and 11 Vodafone networks in EU. The 11 Vodafone networks where the two services can be used include Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Portugal, and Spain.

Source: Wireless Federation.

Zain, the leading mobile operator in Middle East and Africa has brought its Sierra Leone operations under the borderless ‘One Network’. The mobile service will allow the Zain subscribers in the African and Middle East nations to be a part of the mobile community.

Zain subscribers will be able to communicate between these countries and be treated as local subscribers in terms of pricing, while using their home network service.

“Today marks another milestone in the history of Zain as we launch our award winning ‘One Network’ service in another country. Now it covers 18 countries and an area larger than the United States of America and with a population of more than 500 million people,” said Dr. Saad Al Barrak, Zain’s group CEO. He said the introduction of ‘One Network’ mobile service is part of their Drive11 initiative.
The One Network service enables subscribers to make calls and SMS at local rates and will receive incoming calls and SMS for free.

Source: Wireless Federation.