BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union leaders called Friday for mobile phone companies to reduce or eliminate fees for travelers who want to ring home from abroad, saying some of the so-called roaming charges are excessive.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said he has persuaded two Irish mobile phone companies to stop charging customers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after border residents complained they had to pay up when their phone signal picked up a foreign network even though they hadn't left home.
He said the rest of Europe should follow Ireland's example.
"Roaming charges are not necessary," Ahern told reporters. "They are excessively costly."
The European Commission warned it would put forward a law before the summer to force phone companies to charge the same fee for using national and international networks.
Last year, the commission created a Web site to name and shame the companies who charge travelers huge fees to use a mobile phone outside of their country. For several weeks, this site attracted more visitors than any other part of the commission's vast set of Internet pages.
The site showed Maltese customers are charged $15.15 for a four-minute phone call home from Latvia, while Finns pay just 24 cents extra to call from neighboring Sweden.
The Web site was supposed to help consumers find the best deal by showing them costs charged in September 2005 by their home phone company and the network of the country they are visiting.
But the information was incomplete because many companies did not post the fees online despite a promise from national phone associations that they would do so.
EU antitrust regulators started investigating "excessive" roaming prices in 2000, leading to charges that German and British phone companies were abusing their monopoly power. The cases are still ongoing.
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