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Your email address will not be published. Why on earth is roaming so expensive? Carrier plans and features. For users who travel regularly, it is often best to apply ongoing features that never expire to provide continuous coverage. Mobile roaming data costs are incurred by using your cell phone while travelling outside the country, and therefore outside the scope of your mobile operator. How mobile roaming works is a local operator such as Vodacom or MTN will make deals with various mobile operators in other countries so that you, their customer, can have access to mobile services while travelling in those countries.
The first problem with this is that the different mobile operators all make deals with different foreign providers, according to their own unique alliances, rivalries, power struggles and negotiations. This can lead to huge disparities in roaming costs across different networks. For example someone traveling to Australia can pay anything between R As the smallest UK mobile network operator, 3 has a different attitude to data-roaming charges than that of its larger rivals: Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere T-Mobile and Orange's merged operations.
The company's regulatory chief, Hugh Davies, tells ZDNet UK that operators do need to incur some one-off costs when enabling data roaming, but these do not explain the charges being levied on consumers. In fact, he says, data-roaming retail prices bear no relation to the underlying costs of data transport — between 1p and 3p per megabyte, depending on the operator. It's way too high. David Gannon is the senior expert for global products at T-Mobile, the eleventh-largest operator in the world.
He tells it a different way. You've got to get a return on that investment. Gannon gives the stock industry justification for high data-roaming prices: infrastructure and spectrum are expensive , and these costs need to be recouped somehow. Margins are very low on domestic data pricing because that is where the real competition takes place — in the words of Orange roaming chief Yves Martin : "Right now, the mobile operators are a bit stuck into low domestic data prices.
The problem with the argument is operators don't build their networks for foreign visitors; they build them for their domestic customers. Most have already made their money back. Dean Bubley, an analyst at Disruptive Analysis, also says the investment argument is completely unjustified.
Sign the petition for fair data roaming. A similar analysis comes from Steffen Hoernig, an associate economics professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal.
The problem with high prices, Hoernig says, is they "distort demand downwards". This is a problem acknowledged by Orange's Martin, who tells ZDNet UK that his company and its rivals recognise how previous bad experiences with 'bill shock' have scared many customers off ever leaving their smartphones turned on while travelling.
Martin's main market is in Europe. Here, the European Commission, the hub of the continent's political power and a keen advocate of creating a truly single market, has displayed every sign of being fed up with roaming prices in general. The Commission has already forced operators to drastically cut their retail prices for voice and text SMS roaming, and digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has now turned her sights on data roaming.
However, the only concrete measure so far has been a non-binding cap on wholesale prices. According to Bubley, there is no evidence that these falling prices for data roaming have led to higher domestic prices. However, Kroes said in September that she wanted "the gap between roaming and domestic prices to approach zero", as "significant differences between roaming charges and national tariffs cannot be justified in a true single market".
Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes wants "the gap between roaming and domestic prices to approach zero". According to Martin, there is no way operators will agree to data-roaming charges that are equivalent to domestic rates. Arguing that small companies are unable to offer low prices without industry-wide momentum, he cites the example of 3 Like Home , an ill-fated attempt by the operator to eliminate roaming charges for those of its customers who were travelling between the relatively few countries where 3 has networks.
You need some sort of regulation or legislation at the wholesale level, because unless the big operators decide they want to bring their prices down, it's scale that counts. I can't see how the global prices would come down, but the EU prices are coming down quite quickly.
I don't see where the driver is to bring [global prices] down currently because there's no global regulator. Given the historical successes of Kroes and her predecessor, Viviane Reding , there is every chance the Commission will get its way on data-roaming charges. Outside Europe, though, the situation is very different.
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