French regulator to reduce SMS wholesale price

Link: RTE Business – France gets OK to regulate texting prices.
The French regulator has the go ahead to reduce wholesale SMS costs from 4.3 cents per message to 3-3.5 cents.

The European Commission has granted French telecoms authorities the right to regulate the wholesale price of mobile phone text messages, an EU first.

Cat. Pigeons. Etc.

I’ve been pondering on my position about this. I thought perhaps it might be a negative move. I’m thinking specifically of how various aggregators and network operators in the UK would react to such a move in the UK.

While there are various semi relevant economic arguments, I have no specific axe to grind. Ergo my position is thus: SMS is far too expensive. It has been for years. It’s 100% ridiculous. So any action whatsoever to regulate the price of SMS wholesale to TRY and bring down the cost for the consumer… well, I think it’s at least worth giving it a go.

Ultimately it’s more or less useless in the long run. Whatever nonsense you quote me about text bundles and ‘the operators are doing their best’ — I do not accept it.

There is patently NO reason whatsoever that a Vodafone customer (as an example) should have to pay 12.5 pence to send a text. The standard price to the consumer, after their bundle texts have expired, should be about 3-4p.

Likewise, there is NO reason for Orange to PUT UP its standard text price as it did so recently. With this in mind, a bit of regulator action, however fruitless, is possibly better than nothing.