New EU roaming regulations are expected to cause a drop in mobile roaming revenue for operators in 2017, according to a forecast from Juniper Research.
Annual roaming revenue is predicted to fall by 28% in Europe and by 7% globally: a significant portion of an estimated £35 billion ($52 billion) total in the year after next.
However, the Juniper Research report also says roaming revenue is expected to recover, with the lower prices encouraging increased usage.
Nitin Bhas, the author of the report, said “Operators need to encourage more usage; they will need to work with content providers and aggregators even more closely now in order to provide more innovative content services to which users will attach value.”
From June 2017, new EU laws will require mobile network operators to eliminate additional charges for international calls, text and data when European consumers are ‘roaming’ away from their home country within the EU. However, roaming tariffs outside Europe are expected to remain unregulated and higher than within the EU.
[Whitepaper; report]