When opening my last two cellphone bills, I could hardly believe my eyes: instead of the usual $30 to $40 per bill, I was faced by a grand total that could push a destitute student into bankruptcy: $1,200.

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I had spent the last six weeks in Washington D.C. and my cellphone had been the only way to keep in touch with my computer-less boyfriend in Vancouver. A closer look at my bills revealed that in 13 hours of talking to him, I had accumulated $970 in roaming charges.

For the less tech-savvy among us, roaming charges refer to the costs I have to pay for using a network other than the one operated by my cellphone provider.

Roaming is a lot cheaper in Europe. Over the past few years, the European Commission introduced a number of regulations that limit such fees and make owning a cellphone more affordable. Coming from Europe, I had (wrongly) expected that North America would operate under similar regulation.

Like the new 15-cent charge for incoming text messages, roaming charges seem to be another way mobile phone providers pad their bottom lines. The Canadian government has thus far been reluctant to regulate. But that could change in the wake of a new Facebook group against the 15-cent charge that has already attracted more than 36,000 members.

"It's a government that's listening to the boardroom tables rather than to the kitchen tables of the country, where people sit down to pay their bills and they can see that they are being ripped off," said opposition leader Jack Layton, whose New Democratic Party launched the Facebook campaign.

Roaming charges capped across Europe

For more than a year, European telecommunication companies have been legally bound to offer a "Euro rate" for voice roaming in all countries of the European Union. The maximum charges are $0.90 per minute for outgoing calls and $0.45 for incoming calls.

The rates are based on a report commissioned by the EU government, which revealed that the former average charge of $1.80 for voice roaming "could not be explained by underlying costs."

Customers has been billed about five times what cellphone companies had to pay on operational costs. For roaming, main costs are the purchase of airtime minutes from a foreign network provider. Before the "Euro rate," roaming charges accounted for $13.3 billion or 5.7 per cent of the total revenue of Europe's mobile telephone industry.

Not coincidentally, $1.80 is about what Bell, Telus and Rogers charge their costumers today. For voice roaming in the United States, Bell charges $ 1.74 for outgoing calls. Rogers bills $1.70 and Telus $1.45. Incoming calls are charged as well at $0.50 to $0.75 per minute.

How much Bell, Telus or Rogers actually spend on airtime minutes for U.S. network providers is guesswork. Spokespeople for Bell and Rogers told The Tyee that this information is confidential.

"We never give out information to the public about our revenues," said Bell spokesperson Allison Johnson.

Most expensive data in the world

Similar to roaming charges, there is a widening gap between European countries and Canada for prices of text messaging.

In Europe, no incoming calls or text messages are charged. While at the moment, prices for incoming messages are about the same as in Canada, the EU government recently brought in a proposal which could reduce the costs for sending text messages within all EU countries by as much as 70 per cent.

In Canada, prices for text messages jumped by 50 per cent over the last year from 10 to 15 cents. By charging for "inbound" text messages, costs doubled overnight for what is already the most expensive data on the planet.

According to a study done by a space scientist at the University of Leicester, sending a ten-cent SMS text message using a cellphone is more than four times costlier than transmitting data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

That inevitably raises the question, how can world-shattering messages like 'How RU' or 'CU later' be more expensive than data from outer space that revolutionized the world of astronomy?

What's a fair price?

Telus and Bell claim they have to charge more for text messages because Canadians are texting so much.

"The growth in text messages has been nothing short of phenomenal," Telus Mobility spokesperson Anne-Julie Gratton told the Ottawa Citizen. "This volume places tremendous demands on our network and we can't afford to provide this service for free anymore."

But Canadians send only 45.4 million text messages per day, according to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. British mobile phone users send 55 million text messages daily and Germans send 63 million. In both of those countries, incoming messages are free.

"The strain on the networks argument is embarrassingly inaccurate," said Richard Smith, professor at Simon Fraser University and publisher of the Canadian Journal of Communication. "It is incredible that they are able to straight-facingly say something like that."

Text messaging seems to consume nearly no resources at all and with its $100 billion revenue, it is incredibly profitable.

"The radio frequency impact of delivering a text message is very low," says Ian Bell, a Vancouver-based technology executive. "I could basically run the entire world's text messaging network on my Mac Mini at home. It wouldn't have a significant impact."

Considering the low operational costs, entrepreneur Bell said the only fair charge for incoming text messages would be zero.

36,000 join NDP Facebook group

Another explanation for the price of these charges would be the lack of either regulation or competition among Canada's telecommunication companies.

"If the cellphone companies continue to be anti-competitive... and Canadians continue to use cellphones the way they have, we have a growing rationale and a call for regulation," Smith said.

Regulations like the ones introduced by the European Commission are unlikely to become reality in Canada anytime soon. Minister of Industry Jim Prentice was an open enemy of the 15-cent charge, but changed his mind after a meeting with the heads of Bell Mobility and Telus. In a public statement, he said that the government had no intention of introducing new legislation to regulate the pricing policy of cellphone companies.

The NDP's Layton mocked the Tory minister's about-face.

"They went to have a meeting with the CEOs of the telephone companies, and the CEOs of the companies told them to get lost," Layton told The Tyee. "These companies don't seem to realize that... airwaves are public trust. They don't belong to somebody in private, and so a certain basic standard of fairness and accessibility needs to be provided."

Competition is coming

It is striking that the tiny sum of 15 cents can attract 36,000 members to a Facebook group and outrage the nation for weeks.

Maybe the reason for that is not the money itself, but "what lies beneath" as Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa, writes in his blog: "The Canadian cellphone market is discouragingly uncompetitive and expensive by world standards. Fixing those issues will require more work than a couple of press releases and hollow assurances that Canadian consumers enjoy plenty of choice."

Geist's last comment likely refers to Prentice's recent statement that "the telecommunications market in Canada is dynamic" and that "choice is available."

"What the telephone companies are doing is making money while they can," said SFU professor Smith, "but competition is coming really hard and fast."

For example, Globalive Communications won 30 licences at an auction for new wireless spectrum held last month. The Toronto-based company could emerge as a new national cellphone carrier.

Whether or not such competition will have a considerable impact on cellphone charges remains to be seen, said Smith. "It's hard to tell right now what will actually happen... but when there are four, five, six people in the business, it will be less easy for them to not compete."

It is unlikely that the wireless market will have changed significantly by this October. That's when I will next travel to Washington D.C. This time, instead of investing $970 in talking to my boyfriend on the phone, I'll just buy him a ticket: for $970, I could buy three round trips.

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