Talk:Spain/@comment-185.103.182.127-20150921051846/@comment-24682153-20151106224800

It's wrong to bash the EU for this. Telecom markets are still organized nationally. So every operator is regulated by different national rules. The EU does not have any mandate to change domestic markets. All they can do is to limit the excess of roaming charges between EU countries. Hopefully, they will do this better in the coming years.

All national markets in the EU are very different. Taxes, licenses, regulations differ enormously. If every country had the same prices, this WIKI would not be necessary. Generally data in the North and East of Europe are cheaper than in the West or South.

E.g. in Poland the 4 operators paid in 2015 together 9.2 billion PLN or more than 2 billion in €/$ for new licenses. They will have to refinance this in some way. Given 58 million mobile subscribers in the country in 2015, they paid the equivalent of 159 PLN per SIM card. This is like a huge tax. In some other countries like Russia licenses are often given out for free. So unfortunately you can expect mobile prices to rise in Poland for sure.