Getting real on mobile data (and regulatory holidays)

25.01.2011
Sometimes, it is the little anecdotes that come to mind to better illustrate a bigger story.

Through work I attended a conference in Brussels last December, being the annual regulatory policy conference of the European Competitive Telecommunications Association.

One of the more amusing presentations was by a member of the European Parliament from Sweden, Christian Engström, who related his view, based on Ericsson data, that the production cost of one gigabyte of mobile broadband was €1.

The average cost of roaming broadband in the EU, he said, was around €2600 per gigabyte.

His suggestion of a generous retail mark-up of 900 percent, with a regulated maximum price of €10/Gb for roaming data, was met with nervous laughter by the incumbents, but the room was full of nodding heads when he pointed out that a trip in the EU sees people paying more for their use of data than the cost of the travel itself.

Mobile data is under scrutiny locally this year too. Last year the New Zealand and Australian governments issued a paper seeking an informed discussion of why mobile roaming -- voice, text and data -- is so expensive across the Tasman. They were considering a joint approach to tackling the problem, if such was identified.