On Tuesday, the European Commission announced its intention to come up with a plan in order to lower the costs of mobile phone text messages within the European Union's boundaries. The plan is expected to be presented by fall and applied starting next year.

According to Brussels media reports, Viviane Reding, EU Telecoms Commissioner, said the fact that Europe's mobile industry hasn’t yet figured out a way to reach credible price reductions in order to avoid regulation is not a very good sign.

She added that the Commission’s ruling is not going to be a very restrictive one, as it will only impose a fixed ceiling and not a fixed price. She feels that so far, high messaging fees have "drained the wallets" of mobile phone users, and she exemplified with the 77% of young people sending messages while abroad. 

Obviously enough, the cell phone industry is not very happy with this perspective; in an attempt to support the companies’ cause, the GSM Association said that in the past few months, the cost of cross-border text messaging went down by 18% and that of mobile Internet costs by 25%.

As it was estimated that about 25 billion cross-border messages are sent in Europe each year, it is quite obvious that this is a very profitable thing. According to Jose Manuel Baroso, president of the European Commission, lowering the fees of text messaging would definitely boost European business even more.

For the time being, the average price for a message is of €0.29 ($0.46 USD).