The high cost of mobile data roaming

Travelling always makes me think about how far we have come over the past 15 years or so. Before we had cell-phones, we would hunt around for public phones with which to make calls to let loved ones know that we had arrived somewhere safely. If you have ever made a call from a hotel room, you will probably have a decent idea of how expensive it used to be to make an international call.

The real crime in this modern, always-connected age, is how much mobile companies charge for international data roaming. As I write this, I am sitting somewhere between London and Los Angeles. Before I left I asked my service provider to confirm that international roaming was turned on for my account. Not only did I get the confirmation I was looking for, but they also sent me an e-mail reminding me how much it would cost me should I use data services while overseas.

There are apparently two rates for Vodacom subscribers: one that costs R17.XX/MB (for which you have to pay a special subscription); and one that costs R128/MB.

Now to put that into perspective, if you were to connect on an old circuit switched network (dial-up) at 56Kbps you would (assuming that you get full line speed) be able to download 24.6MB of data in an hour of being connected. That means that it would take roughly two and a half minutes to download 1MB of data – a rate of roughly R50 per minute if the charge was R128 for 1MB of data.

Of course, I am making some sweeping assumptions about how fast a download speed you might get on an international dial-up link, but considering that it actually costs the international network on which you are roaming virtually nothing to route internet traffic, and that many of these networks offer ‘unlimited’ packages to their clients for use with their smartphones, you can see that someone is taking the piss.

If I were a mobile network operator, instead of making it a largely indifferent choice of whom you roam with, I would put up signs at all of the airports offering discount data roaming rates, equal to the highest rate that I charge my domestic customers. In the South African equation that would be something in the region of R2/MB.

The nett effect would be that foreign visitors would automatically head over to the manual network selection on their phones and choose my network because I was offering them something of real value, the ability to use their smartphone without them having to sell their house when they got home. At the same time I would be making sure that all their voice traffic would be routed across my network, adding to the amount of money I got from foreign visitors.

I have yet to hear of any network anywhere in the world doing this. The only time I have heard of networks cutting their roaming rates is when an overly officious regulator (like those in the European Union) tells them to stop stealing from their foreign partners’ customers and start acting like decent human beings.

Then those networks in Europe, instead of doing the decent thing and implementing the same charges for non-EU customers, jacked up the prices for visitors from the rest of the world. That means you and me. As a result, I sat at London’s Heathrow Airport, too scared to turn on the data functions on my iPhone.

Maybe its time data roaming moved out of the stone age and mobile operators started to behave like real businesses, instead of highwaymen ambushing unsuspecting victims along the information superhighway.

The high cost of mobile data roaming << Comments and views