House of Commons briefing on mobile roaming and Brexit

In July 2017, the House of Commons Library published a briefing paper on the impact of Brexit on the recent abolition of mobile roaming charges (the "Briefing Paper").

The European Commission's 2015 regulation on roaming and net neutrality (the so-called "Roaming Regulation") established a new pricing regime for regulating roaming services and lead to the end of retail roaming charges across the EEA on 15 June 2017. Mobile phone users are therefore currently able to use their domestic mobile phone subscriptions when periodically travelling abroad without incurring additional charges (subject to a fair use policy). The Roaming Regulation also set maximum wholesale roaming charges between a mobile user's domestic network operator and the foreign operator on whose network the customer roams whilst abroad. The Roaming Regulation is a directly applicable EU regulation and once the UK is no longer part of the EEA (as currently envisaged in the Government's "hard" Brexit plans), the regulation will cease to apply to the UK.
The practical effect of Brexit will depend in part on the future relationship between the UK and EU. The Briefing Paper sets out possible scenarios for mobile roaming once the UK has left the EU, with the two most plausible scenarios to retain the current roaming pricing regime being:

• Domestic legislation: the UK Government could adopt the Roaming Regulation as domestic legislation under the so-called Repeal Bill to (i) prohibit UK operators from imposing retail roaming surcharges on customers; and (ii) cap wholesale charges on UK operators. However, this alone would not oblige EU mobile operators in other member states to comply with reciprocal caps on wholesale roaming charges in respect of UK mobile operators; the UK cannot unilaterally preserve the reciprocal side of this framework in domestic legislation alone without the consent of those other member states / the EU (e.g. in a Free Trade Agreement see below).
• UK – EU Free Trade Agreement ("FTA"): Mobile roaming provisions (including wholesale roaming caps) could be included in the Free Trade Agreement negotiated between the UK and the EU. However, to date no FTA with a third country has included provisions on mobile roaming.

If mobile roaming is not dealt with as set out above, the Briefing Paper highlights that UK mobile phone users travelling to Europe could be subject to additional retail roaming charges (and vice versa) as the regime will instead depend on individual roaming agreements that are commercially negotiated between mobile operators, rather than wholesale regulation - EEA operators will be to apply higher wholesale roaming charges on UK operators, which in turn UK operators may pass on by charging their customers for retail roaming. Such a scenario would not, however, seem to align with the Government's intention to focus on ensuring that "UK telecoms companies can continue to trade as freely and competitively as possible with the EU and let European companies do the same in the UK".

The Briefing Note anticipates operators that are part of large international groups will be partly insulated from such increases, whereas other operators (such as MVNOs) will not.

The House of Commons Library briefing paper on the impact of Brexit on the recent abolition of mobile roaming charges can be found here.