Western Balkans to Scrap Roaming Costs From 2021

Western Balkan countries have signed a landmark agreement at the regional Digital Summit to scrap all roaming costs within two years, under the concept ‘roam like at home’.

Photo: Information Society Ministry of North Macedonia

Western Balkan Ministers for Telecommunications signed an agreement on Thursday in Belgrade to gradually remove all roaming costs in the region.

Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia will for the first time have harmonized calling, texting and GB prices.

Kosovo Minister for Economic Development Valdrin Lluka told BIRN that the agreement will come into effect from July 1 this year, with reduced tariffs. From July 1, 2021, all tariffs should be removed, under the concept “Roam like at Home”.

The agreement is intended to facilitate communication in the region and harmonize the telecommunications market.

From July 1, mobile calls will cost 19 cents per minute, an SMS will cost 6 cents and one megabyte of internet will be 2.5 cents.

Until now, the costs for such services were much higher, rising to 2.5 euros per minute for calls in the region.

In 2014, BIRN reported that the cost of roaming in the Balkans was up to six times higher than the cost in Western Europe, according to studies at the time.

Earlier attempts to remove roaming costs included only specific countries, but not the whole region, and were complicated by Serbia’s dispute with Kosovo over its status as an independent state.

Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro reached an agreement on reducing the prices of mobile phone calls abroad in 2014. According to European Commission data, they cut roaming costs by up to 80 per cent in the Western Balkans since 2015, as BIRN reported.

“We already have an agreement in place for four countries, but, if we want to include entire Western Balkans, that also means Albania plus Kosovo … of course, there is a political connotation here regarding the status of Kosovo. If the signed agreement includes only the four aforementioned countries, then that would practically mean that roaming charges would be abolished in the summer of 2021,” Serbia’s Minister of Telecommunications, Rasim Ljajic, said in November 2018.

In May 2018, at the Sophia summit, the European Union set aside €30 million for investments in broadband roll-outs in the region, as part of a Digital Agenda for the Western Balkans, to move the region’s economies towards digitization.

The Sophia summit between the EU and Western Balkans, intended to improve connectivity and security, promised concrete steps to strengthen cooperation in the region.

During the summit, Western Balkan countries agreed to reduce roaming costs among themselves, and the EU pledged to develop a roadmap to reduce the roaming costs between the EU and the Western Balkans.