European Commission to push EU leaders on single telecoms market

Creating a single telecoms market in Europe and cutting the cost of doing business over the Internet could boost the region's economy by 4 percent by 2020, the European Commission will tell European Union leaders.

The push from the European Union's executive, when EU leaders meet on October 24-25, comes as Neelie Kroes, the EU's telecommunications commissioner, makes a fresh attempt to overhaul the bloc's telecoms sector. Following Brussels' success in curbing the cost of using mobile phone use, she now wants to cap the price of cross-border fixed-line calls in Europe, where the commission says technology and telecommunications make a smaller contribution to the economy than in the United States or China. Kroes also wants EU veto power over national auctions of mobile spectrum, and to make it easier for operators to charge companies such as Google more for carrying heavy loads of data at high speeds.