(BRUSSELS) - The European Commission has mobile phone operators in its sights again with plans due on Tuesday to regulate the price of sending text messages and to tighten billing rules.

Eager to build on the success last year of capping the price of mobile phone calls while abroad in Europe, the European Union's executive arm wants to ensure that consumers do not pay too much for other services as well.

"We will impose a maximum limit of 11 cents per text message while abroad," EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding told German magazine Der Spiegel.

Currently, sending a text message from another EU country outside a European mobile phone user's home country costs 29 euro cents on average, 10 times the price of sending a message domestically.

Reding said that operators' "costs do not justify such high prices."

The Luxembourg EU commissioner also wants to require mobile operators to bill by the second following evidence that some that currently bill by the minute, systematically rounding the price of calls up.

She said that rounding to the next minute led to consumers being overcharged by 20 percent "for something they have not even consumed.

"That's why billing by the second is going to be required," she told Der Spiegel.

France, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain already have legislation in place that requires operators to charge by the second.

The practice of rounding up call durations to the minute undermines the effectiveness of EU caps on the price of making and receiving calls while abroad, which is known as roaming.

One EU official told AFP that under the new rules, billing by the second would only apply after the first 30 seconds of a cross-border telephone call in Europe, leaving operators free to charge a fixed rate for calls last only a few seconds.

The package due to be presented on Tuesday also includes plans to drive down the cost of using mobile phones or other devices to surf the Internet while abroad using mobile phone networks.

Reding's proposals will have to be approved by EU governments and the European Parliament but she said she was confident that they "will take effect, as is, in the summer of 2009."

The Luxembourg EU commissioner has struggled to gain support for her other big telecommunications reform which would see the creation of a European super-regulator.

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