Crusading EU Telecoms commissioner, Viviane ‘Westwood’ Reding is beavering away once again in an attempt to cut the cost of mobile phone calls, which remain high relative to fixed-lines. Just over a year after she successfully managed to cut roaming charges across Europe, the fearless Eurocrat has now set her sights on call termination charges, the fees operators levy on each other to use their networks.

Right now, these charges vary wildly from one Eurostate to the next: Cypriots only have to pay a measly 2 Euro cents per minute, while those poor Bulgarians are expected to cough up a wallet-busting 18 cents per minute. It is the opinion of the grand high commission in Brussels that these discrepancies in prices are passed on to the end user, resulting in higher and less predictable call charges. Such tariffs are apparently up to nine times higher than land-line equivalents, and Reding believes that ‘The consumer pays the price for these gaps between national regulatory policies.’

New guidelines published by the EU mean that operators must bring their termination charges into line by 2011, lest they face the wrath of Brussels for non-compliance. These new regulations, it is hoped, will cut call charges across the United States of Europe by up to 70%, although the move has attracted criticism from some quarters, not least of which the GSM Association, who reckon that the operators will face difficulty from the reduced profits of cheaper termination charges and will end up increasing charges elsewhere to soften the blow. Cash strapped cellular operators might, for example, find themselves having to push up the cost of low use tariffs to make up some of the money lost on termination charges, which at present net them around 20% of their revenue.