rec_23

(23) In specific and exceptional circumstances where a roaming provider is not able to recover its overall actual and projected costs of providing regulated retail roaming services from its overall actual and projected revenues from the provision of such services, that roaming provider should be able to apply for authorisation to apply a surcharge with a view to ensuring the sustainability of its domestic charging model. The assessment of the sustainability of the domestic charging model should be based on relevant objective factors specific to the roaming provider, including objective variations between roaming providers in the Member State concerned and the level of domestic prices and revenues. That may, for example, be the case for flat-rate domestic retail models of operators with significant negative traffic imbalances, where the implicit domestic unit price is low and the operator’s overall revenues are also low relative to the roaming cost burden, or where the implicit unit price is low and actual or projected roaming services consumption is high. Once both wholesale and retail roaming markets have fully adjusted to the generalisation of roaming at domestic price levels and its incorporation as a normal feature of retail tariff plans, such exceptional circumstances are no longer expected to arise. In order to avoid the domestic charging model of roaming providers being rendered unsustainable by such cost recovery problems, generating a risk of an appreciable effect on the evolution of domestic prices or so-called ‘waterbed effect’, roaming providers, upon authorisation by the national regulatory authority, should, in such circumstances, be able to apply a surcharge to regulated retail roaming services only to the extent necessary to recover all relevant costs of providing such services.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-10-29 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.