Last week I met with lobbyists from Telekom Austria, on the subject of data roaming. Everybody agrees that today’s roaming charges of around 3000 euro per gigabyte are unreasonable and are hurting the single market.

The Commission wants to introduce a retail price cap of 900 euro per GB from the first of July 2012, combined with a wholesale price cap of 300 euro per GB.

I am instead proposing at retail cap of 20 euro per GB, and a wholesale price cap of 10 euro per GB by the same date. This would bring data roaming surcharges in line with the domestic price for using your smartphone or laptop to access wireless Internet.

When I met with the lobbyists from Telekom Austria, they made clear that they agree with the Commission, and think that a 300 euro per GB wholesale price cap is reasonable. I explained why I think the price cap should be 30 times lower, at 10 euro per GB.

I base my suggestion on the fact that the production cost for 1 GB of mobile data transfer is about 1 euro or less. I have several public sources to back up this estimate of the production cost, which makes a 10 euro per GB wholesale cap more than reasonable.

I promised that I would come back to the lobbyists with references. Here is my reply: