For Mobile Challengers, the European association that represents small mobile phone operators, it is the wholesale market that should be regulated, not roaming costs.

Roaming costs remain high because of limited competition on the telecoms market. While the Commission is pushing for rate ceilings to remedy the problem, Mobile Challengers puts the blame on commercial agreements between large operators, such as the FreeMove alliance. Set up in 2003, FreeMove groups four European giants: Movistar (Spain), Orange (France), T-Mobile (Germany) and TIM (Italy). Its aim is to offer a better deal to consumers in the area of roaming costs. Mobile Challengers argues that alliances of this type lock up the wholesale market since these operators buy and sell “traffic minutes” from each other at preferential rates, to the detriment of small operators. The result is limited competition, in the interest of large operators. One way of addressing the problem could be to adopt rules limiting such agreements to 50%, suggested one small operator, which prefers to remain anonymous.

The debate also concerns the fact that, through such agreements, the large operators also secure the transit of calls by subscribers from abroad via their network. The small operators find that they are placed at a disadvantage since the number of foreign users whose calls transit through their networks collapses as a result. This practice is the subject of a complaint submitted to the European Commission in June 2005 by Bouygues Telecom against FreeMove, a complaint that has yet to be addressed.