Press release - BEREC welcomes the legislative proposal of the EC on Roaming Regulation review

The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) is convinced that end-users in the European Union shall continue to benefit from roaming without additional charges when travelling in Europe. BEREC considers that the Roaming Regulation and the introduction of Roam Like at Home (RLAH) are an evident success and a substantial contribution to further completing the single market.
As the current Roaming Regulation expires on 30 June 2022, the Commission today published a proposal of review of the Roaming Regulation to be discussed by the co-legislators. This proposal is destined to allow the smooth continuation of using our mobile devices abroad without surcharges.
BEREC will actively participate throughout the political negotiations and stands ready to provide its technical input and advice when needed. BEREC Chair Michel Van Bellinghen (BIPT, Belgium) emphasizes, “As an ultimate objective, we dedicate our work to promoting choice of high-quality electronic communications services and empowerment for end-users. The review of the Roaming Regulation shall imply the roaming subscribers enjoying the Quality of service as high as offered in the home country. This will allow the end-users to genuinely ‘roam like at home’. The new legislation shall also reinforce the seamless and equivalent access of end-users to emergency services and increases transparency for value-added services.”
BEREC plays an essential role in the implementation, monitoring and supervision mechanisms related to the Roaming Regulation, which are well established and well-functioning.
Based on the current version of the Roaming Regulation, BEREC regularly provides the Commission with the semi-annual international roaming benchmark reports. According to the tasks currently entrusted to BEREC, the reports are adopted in March and October each year. Every year BEREC also submits to the Commission the annual reports on the transparency and comparability of roaming tariffs. In addition, BEREC issues guidelines to support the harmonized implementation of the roaming regulation.
On top of the regular reports and guidelines, BEREC provided its Opinion and input to the European Commission in 2019 and 2020 in which it analyzed the benefits of the Roaming Regulation as well as the functioning of the retail and the wholesale roaming market. BEREC has also assessed the Quality of Service in roaming; value-added services, the sustainability of RLAH, and the permanent roaming for machine-to-machine (M2M) services. BEREC experts provided its monitoring data related to the free-of-charge access to emergency service 112 for roaming subscribers.