Europe is a world leader in the mobile communications sector, with many of the world’s largest equipment suppliers, mobile phone companies and mobile content producers.
Over 2 billion people across 217 countries and territories now use mobile phones based on the GSM standard. It became a globally dominant and worldwide standard over about 82% of the world’s mobile phones.
The Global Systems for Mobile Communications standard allows users in different networks and with different handsets to communicate with each other.
Today, Europe is building on this success to extend its leadership in future generations of mobile communications.
The second-generation (2G) GSM-based services are being complemented by the third generation (3G). 3G offers new and advanced services on the mobile phones, such as:
While the costs of using mobile phones have dropped enormously, the cost when using a mobile phone abroad has remained excessively high.
These “mobile roaming charges” currently affect more than 147 million EU citizens.