Comments on: OECD on international roaming rates

By: baudhead

baudhead — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:11:50 +0000

I have an iPhone with telecom global roaming. I recently flew to Brisbane and when I arrived I switched on my iPhone to check my emails. I had 2 new emails with no attachments in my inbox. When I got my bill from telecom they had charged me $263 for the ‘call’. How is that possible?

By: wreck1080

wreck1080 — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:25:09 +0000

The local interconnect fee that the wireless telcos charge each other is a similar scam. The fee allows the telco to claim they are merely passing on charges from the other telco. Sounds fair enough, until you learn that there is a cosy little agreement between them to charge this. I’m surprised they are not prosecuted over this. It is not allowed in some other countries.

And, if telecom / vodafone are so holy, then why do they sign a roaming agreement with other telcos to similarly over charge roamers? They’re like pigs in the trough.

I always buy a prepaid sim when overseas. Eg, in Aussie recently, got a prepaid Sim with around 1 gig of data and some free calling for about $80 nzd.

By: insider

insider — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:26:19 +0000

kk nails it for me. 1% of the business want to wag the corporate dog. That number implies a premium to focus attention on it, otherwise why bother when you have a million other customers not wanting that? Many global companies have their own international telco agreements anyway that cover off regular global access.

By: grumpy

grumpy — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:02:07 +0000

I have had the same experience with Vodafone in Australia. Vodafone NZ say “that’s the bill we got from Aus because you are not their custome”.
Presumably the same thing happens the other way around!
Vodafone NZ and AU charge their own customers around $NZ50 per month for 3GB but $30/MB under this rort.

The thing is that Vodafone Global make a killing.

By: brucehoult

brucehoult — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:01:26 +0000

Your 1c per MB is at least an order of magnitude higher than ISP costs. I’ve been paying 0.15 c/MB as a TelstraClear domestic customer for about the last five years, so I’m sure their cost is a lot lower than that now. xNet sell to domestic customers at 0.1 c/MB.

By: krazykiwi

krazykiwi — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:58:42 +0000

$30/MB is cheap for mobile data … we’re paying $1000+/MB to send text messages at 20c a pop.

Yeah that’s quite a rate isn’t it! The key thing is, of course, that many services have value-based pricing, while others have cost plus. To communicate and be connected is a basic human motivation so value-based pricing has worked well for the mobile carriers

By: Nigel

Nigel — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:40:21 +0000

20c a txt for roaming ??, try 80c receive/send if you are the good ol USA.

The telco’s are playing us for fools & it’s annoying, it just means you do stuff like use skype to send a txt back to NZ ( 8c Euro ) & for calls. A smarter play would be to actually encourage usage, instead they are encouraging people to buy sim cards at destinations & I don’t see how that is good for the telco back in NZ.

By: Graeme Edgeler

Graeme Edgeler — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:23:42 +0000

$30/MB is cheap for mobile data … we’re paying $1000+/MB to send text messages at 20c a pop.

By: Pete George

Pete George — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:06:07 +0000

Thanks kk, I checked 2Degrees and because they don’t cover some of the countries I’m going to I didn’t think they were worth it, I forgot about doing just the SIM.

By: krazykiwi

krazykiwi — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:52:55 +0000

Pete, I brougth a cheap 2Degrees handset recently. It accepts my Vodafone NZ SIM fine, so should also accept foreign pre-paid SIM for each country you travel in.

By: dime

dime — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:42:50 +0000

or just a pre paid sim card… unless youre using some steam driven piece of crap?

if you do buy a phone, be careful as a lot are “locked”. not too hard to unlock em, but its a pain

By: Pete George

Pete George — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:39:12 +0000

I’ve just been looking at roaming options for a trip next month – I’d have to get a new phone, and pay through the nose for any use. It’s better to buy a cheap phone when I get there.

By: dime

dime — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:20:34 +0000

it just sucks. im super paranoid when overseas. having a blackberry helps, emails are compressed and i dont openattachments on it

By: krazykiwi

krazykiwi — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:12:23 +0000

Yes the rates are astronomical. I worked for a big telco a while back. Our IBT’s (‘International Business Travellers’) accounted for 1% of global connections, and 10% of global revenue. So these folks are seen as cash cows.

Regulation isn’t that east though, because the high charges are levied by foreign carriers and billed back to the NZ-based IBT with the local carrier simply acting as a billing agency. When I was involved the roaming traffic in either direction between two countries was roughly the same, so carriers didn’t have any internal charging regime – they simply kept what they earned from their inbound IBT’s. We could regulate how much our local carriers charge back to visitors roaming here I guess, making NZ a fractionally cheaper country to visit while nailing local carrier’s mobile revenues.