The European Commission sketched plans Tuesday to force telecommunications companies to reduce the price of using mobile phones abroad because operators have snubbed earlier calls to cut costs.

Disgusted that operators had ignored warnings to cut rates of what is known as roaming charges, Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding said she had decided to push ahead with new regulations to force prices lower.

"Today it is only when using your mobile phone abroad that you realise that there are still borders in Europe," she told journalists.

"Unfortunately you only see that several weeks after having come back from a trip when you receive a very high bill for having communicated on your mobile outside your home country," Reding added.

"For me it is unacceptable that consumers are punished on their phone bill simply for crossing a border inside the European Union," she said.

Hoping to convince operators to reduce rates voluntarily, the commission launched a website in October last year revealing roaming charges of mobile network operators across the EU but there have been little changes in prices since then.

In an update, the commission found that charges vary widely across the EU from as high as 13.05 euros charged to a Maltese consumer roaming for four minutes in Latvia to as low as 0.20 euros for a four minute peak-time call made on a Finnish mobile contract from Sweden.

"I have warned operators repeatedly ... that prices have to be brought down but mobile operators seem to have difficulties in understanding my message," Reding said.

The commission would make formal proposals on new regulation by June and if member states and the European Parliament give their approval in the following months, consumers could see the impact of the regulations by mid-2007.

In a key proposal, the commission was considering making operators charge a customer the price of call when calling locally while abroad in the EU and a normal international tariff when calling back home or to another EU country.

Another proposal would be to eliminate roaming charges when someone received a call from aboard.

Brussels also wants to require operators to not charge foreign operators substantially more than the actual cost of a call and the commission will try to ensure that wholesale savings are passed on to consumers.

The head of the British telecom regulator Kip Meek said: "The high retail prices ... are held up by high wholesale prices and retail competition cannot address this effectively."

"Market pressures which would normally enable competition to bite don't seem to be working in this instance," added Meek, who is also president of the EU telecom regulators group.

The BEUC European consumers-protection lobby hailed the initiative as a victory for mobile phone users.

"The regulation is a good thing because operators have been ripping off consumers for years," said BEUC spokeswoman Muriel Danis.

However, the new regulations could cut deep into operators' profits with the EU roaming market estimated to be worth about 10 billion euros (12 billion dollars) and making up about 10 percent of mobile phone companies' revenues.

As a result, operators have vowed a tough fight against the the new rules, arguing that more regulation is not needed and could have unforseen consequences.

"European Commission proposals to introduce an additional layer of regulation governing international roaming services ... are unnecessary and could do long-term damage to a key European industry," said the GSM Association, a lobby which represents the industry.