The European Commission has promised to end the ‘rip-off’ of high charges for texts made when travelling in Europe.

The commission said it had been forced into action after the mobile industry failed to heed previous warnings that it needed to clean up its act. Some 2.5 billion text messages are sent by roaming customers every year.

According to recent calculations the average cost of a ‘roaming’ text message in the EU between October 2007 and March 2008 was €0.29 – more than ten times the cost of domestic texts. Costs were as high as €0.80 per message for travellers from Belgium.

This differential pricing will be swept away under legislation to be put before the European Parliament by the end of the year, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, promised today. Details have yet to announced, but a key advisory group to the commission is likely to recommend a price cap of between €0.11 and €0.15 per SMS (text).

The new legislation would force telecoms providers to create a ‘truly single market for mobile text services’, Barroso said.  

The Commission said it was also working to put an end to the ‘bill shocks’ that inevitably accompany those roaming customers who use a mobile connection to surf the internet.

In the meantime, the Commission today also launched a new website, which it promised would ‘make transparent the prices currently charged to consumers who use their mobile phone for sending text messages or surfing the web abroad in one of the 27 EU Member States.’