Reding takes aim at texting and mobile data download prices

Further reductions in the price of data and voice calls would also follow if, as seems highly likely, the new measures are voted through. They would become law by July next year.

Ms. Reding has been, and remains, steadfast in her determination to slash what she regards as the unacceptably high charges mobile operators levy on consumers when they roam outside the confines of their home nations. She began her ongoing campaign back in 2005 and targeted voice calls in 2007. The Commissioner has since become the European mobile industry's most reviled and feared critic.

And now that she is turning her attention to texting and 3G web-browsing, mobile operators will get the opportunity to ramp-up their anti-regulatory rhetoric to stentorian levels once again.

With effect from next summer, the European Commission (EC) intends to cap the SMS roaming fee for all EU member states at €0.11 per message. For UK subscribers roaming abroad this will equate to a price cut of some 60 per cent, with the cost of an average roaming text being reduced from 23 pence to just 9 pence.

Back in 2007 Commissioner Reding told the European mobile carriers that they would have to address what she described as the "rip-off" and "extortionate" prices charged to subscribers for using roaming services and dismissed the operator's rationale for maintaining high roaming tariffs as "fantasy costs having no relationship to - or basis in - reality."

She placed a deadline on the operators by which time they were required voluntarily to reduce the costs of texting and browsing. However, the deadline passed on July 31 this year with no agreements in place and so the EC is now moving to impose by legislative fiat what could not be put into place by voluntary means.

Yesterday Ms.