The Impact of Declining Mobile Roaming Prices in Western Europe: MNO Strategies to Seize Market Opportunities

‘The Impact of Declining Mobile Roaming Prices in Western Europe: MNO Strategies to Seize Market Opportunities,’ a new Telecom Insider Report by Pyramid Research, offers an overview of the intra-European roaming market in Western Europe and highlights the main strategies implemented by mobile operators to mitigate the decrease in roaming prices. It then looks into detail at three specific markets and presents the opportunities arising from lower roaming prices.

Key Findings

• The mobile market in Western Europe has reached high penetration levels (143% in 2014 and 157% expected in 2019) resulting from fierce competition at national levels. However, mobile services are still produced and promoted at the national level resulting in low pan-European competition among mobile operators and initial high roaming prices. To tackle this issue, the European Union has been decreasing roaming prices within the EU since 2007. Complete elimination of roaming tariffs is planned for 2018 and current price caps (in force from July 2014) will prevail until then.
• Intra-European roaming revenue represents 5% on average of European telcos’ overall revenue. Consumption of roaming services remains low in the EU due to high roaming prices despite increasing intra-EU travelling. Aside from high prices, alternatives to roaming, such as Wi-Fi and NGA hotspots, local SIM cards and multi-SIM cards also have an impact on revenue. To tackle this issue, operators have put into place several means to increase intra-European roaming revenue. These include ‘roam like home’ offers, adoption of wholesale solutions and partnerships with OTT applications.
• There is a huge latent market left untapped by operators in Europe. Indeed, increased overall traffic (and mostly in data) can trigger operators’ revenue even more with lower roaming prices. Overall, operators are missing out on a market of 300m mobile users according to the EU.

• Introduction
• EU regulation and rationale
• Review of roaming price caps
• Impact of roaming regulations on traffic and revenue
• Intra-European roaming traffic trends
• Evolution of roaming prices and revenue
• Mobile service revenue outlook in Western Europe
• Alternatives to mobile roaming services
• Factors holding back pan-regional competition
• MNO strategies for offsetting falling roaming pricing
• Roam-like-home
• Cost reductions through wholesale solutions
• Zero-rated OTT-enabled roaming via IP communications
• Market opportunities for MNOs
• Latent market opportunity with non-roamers
• Data roaming opportunity
•  Market detail: Case studies
• Orange, France
• Virgin Mobile, UK
• 3 Italia, Italy
• Key findings and recommendations
• Acronyms and definitions