Summary

  • The 2029 plan for equal domestic and intra-EU consumer prices sits behind two earlier milestones: an all-use BEREC benchmark due by October 2026, then a Commission review by June 2027.
  • The latest published benchmark measures a narrower, older slice of usage. Its figures are useful context, but they cannot answer the review’s questions about wholesale cost, bundles, national price effects, provider revenue or investment.

Analysis

A price transition is already written into law

A call from home to a number in another EU country is an intra-EU communication. A call made while the customer is travelling abroad falls under roaming rules instead. The distinction matters: this review concerns the first case, not the price of using a phone on a trip.

Since 2019, consumer calls and SMS from one EU country to another have been subject to retail caps of €0.19 per minute and €0.06 per message, excluding VAT. Regulation (EU) 2024/1309 extended the framework and set a staged move toward equal domestic and intra-EU prices. Providers may offer that equality voluntarily from 1 January 2025, subject to fair-use and anti-fraud safeguards. From 1 January 2029, they must not charge consumers different retail prices for domestic and intra-EU communications, provided the required technical safeguards have been adopted.

That is a conditional legal path, not a fresh decision scheduled for 2029. The European Commission must first review Article 5a by 30 June 2027 after consulting BEREC. The Commission may submit a legislative proposal if the assessment warrants one. It must also adopt the technical safeguards by 30 June 2028. The review is therefore the point at which the existing direction can be assessed against market evidence; it is not a blank page.

The first clock measures use, not the final tariff

A separate clock is already running. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2592 requires BEREC to update its intra-EU benchmark so that it reports all use of intra-EU communications. The updated report is due by October 2026. Providers may rely on the latest available benchmark until 1 January 2027 at the latest.

The distinction between those milestones is easy to miss. A benchmark helps describe use and feeds fair-use assessments. It does not itself set a retail price, adopt the 2028 safeguards or decide how the Commission should treat national markets. The statutory review has a broader evidence remit than the benchmark alone.

BEREC’s 2026 work programme planned to publish the seventh benchmark at Plenary 3. But the official list of public documents approved at the 1 October meeting does not include that report. As of 10 October, the report register still identifies the sixth benchmark, covering April 2024 to March 2025. The omission does not establish why the publication is absent or when it will appear. It does mean that the public record available for this review still rests on data ending a year and a half before the October 2026 benchmark deadline.

The old figures are a baseline, not a verdict

The sixth report collected data from more than 200 providers, including fixed and mobile operators with at least 0.5% market share and significant mobile virtual network operators. In its two latest periods, the EEA-average share of active mobile subscribers using a regulated intra-EU tariff moved from 14.58% to 13.28%. The share using alternative tariffs moved from 0.34% to 0.31%.

Those percentages do not show that 13.28% of all mobile calls crossed a border, or that the rest used an app. They describe subscribers using particular tariff categories. The report also recorded average revenue of €0.04 per regulated fixed-call minute, €0.06 per regulated mobile-call minute and €0.04 per regulated SMS in both periods. These are report-defined revenues per unit, not a full plan price, a wholesale transit cost or a measure of what an individual household paid after bundles and allowances.

That gap matters because the law asks the Commission to examine more than the price of a metered minute. Its review factors include wholesale costs, retail prices and competition by national market, consumer preferences and bundled offers, provider revenue and—if possible—investment capacity. It also calls for evidence on number-independent communications and other alternatives, as well as how tariff plans are changing.

A usage series can show whether reported use is moving. It cannot establish the economics of a bundle whose price includes data, domestic minutes and a set of international calls. A per-unit revenue figure cannot reveal the wholesale cost of carrying a route, the revenue forgone under a price change, or whether a provider would alter network investment. Those questions need different evidence and compatible observation periods.

Consultation supplies evidence; it does not transfer the decision

BEREC’s call for input, opened on 2 October and closing on 6 November, asks interested parties for data, examples and market experience. BEREC will use the submissions to prepare an Opinion for the Commission. That is a meaningful opportunity to improve the record, particularly where operator cost and consumer-plan information is not visible in public statistics.

But a submission does not become a tariff rule because it is detailed, and an Opinion is not the implementing act. The law assigns the review and safeguard decisions to the Commission, after consulting BEREC. Providers then have to translate those rules into customer tariffs, billing systems, fair-use policies and anti-fraud controls. Consumers are the people who experience the result; their actual choices and bills must therefore be part of the evidence.

This separation is a practical safeguard. Expertise can clarify how a benchmark was assembled; operators can disclose cost and usage conditions; consumer groups can describe how bundles work in practice. None of those contributions should be mistaken for the legal authority to decide. Nor does that limit make participation pointless: evidence is what allows the decision-maker to test whether a price rule matches the market it is meant to govern.

The useful question for the November call is not simply whether equal prices sound fair. It is whether the evidence can connect usage, wholesale cost, consumer choice, provider revenue and national market effects without treating one average as a universal answer. The 2026 benchmark and 2027 review will be credible only if their measures answer the questions the law actually assigns.

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