Reasonable European data roaming is alive
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 at 4:11PM Three is the latest UK carrier to announce more affordable roaming data rates for travellers to Europe. £5 a day will give you all you need. The only questions the carriers need to answer now is why it has been so expensive for such a long time?
"Going on your holidays any time soon? Worried that you might need to keep your phone switched off to avoid running up a big data bill? Well, worry no more. From today, just in time for summer, all our Pay Monthly Phone customers will be able to enjoy the best of the internet on their smartphones while in the EU, without the fear of running up a massive bill.
Introducing our brand new Euro Internet Pass, designed to let you browse, tweet, update and upload for just a fiver a day. No more hunting for internet cafés, no more searching for WiFi hotspots. The Euro Internet Pass gives you the benefits of the internet, without any of the hassle."
Reader Comments (13)
I look forward to the day when the EC prohibits anything from being sold at more than a minimal mark up on cost price. Should bring a lot of prices down.
The communications market is a gold mine! Just SMS alone is worth less then a cent for them and they have been charging dozens of cents! And then they "offer" free packs of this and that and we all jump with joy. We are paying a lot more above what we should pay.
We are paying a lot more above what we should pay.
What determines what one "should" pay, though?
Wow... 5£ a day is cheap?
A couple of days ago I received a text from o2 outlining their updated European (not UK) service (I have a monthly SIM with unlimited UK data, 700 mins and unlimited texts):
- 50p connection charge to make or receive a call & then it uses your UK call/mins allowance
- Calls received are free up to 60 minutes
- £1.99 per day for data (meaning up to 25MB per day)
So it looks like telcos are finally getting the message. Unless you're a business user I think people are very careful about using roaming for data loading/internet usage overseas because of the prohibitive costs. I suspect that within the next 12 months a more enlightened policy of 'no cost voice calls' with tiered all-encompassing data tariffs will be deployed given the ratio of voice to data traffic these days.
At least this means my summer holidays will have me using my phone far more than I have recently and, as such, it's a step in the right direction.
@Neil
"A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.
So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand - if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 song = 4 Megabytes.
If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS."
I don't know what we should pay, but that we are paying in excess when compared with other similar services, we are.
Sure, if you analyse in that basis, the cost per megabyte for SMS is expensive. But you are not forced to use it - you choose to do so. I struggle with the notion that a government should be able to force prices set by private companies in a competitive market.
£5/day - count me out - that is daylight robbery. If they said £5 for 250MB of data over a month period I would probably be a lot more tempted. Personally if I am going to be roaming in a foreign country I suspect it is more likely to be lots of quick roams every now and again, rather than one long session i.e. checking email, Map use (though that will shortly no longer be a worry - thanks Google), and checking websites. Thus would rather pay for a certain amount of MB and have it over a certain period. And that better be decent VFM....
It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.
It would cost be a fortune to burn a song to CD, put it in my bag, and fly it over to my cousin in Australia (and come home again) — it costs virtually nothing to send a song online. As such, flights are too expensive...
Something may well be expensive, if you use it abnormally.
Yes, we can see things that way. I also understand they spent millions in infrastructures and they have to have a positive return.
Actually the reason for that 140 bit limit is that SMS uses a sideband that already existed on mobile phones for other purposes, and that was the maximum data packet it could take.
Some bright spark worked out how to use that existing sideband to send text messages on.
Neil in a competitive market it would impossible to charge thousands of times the cost price. Clearly they compete in certain areas and not in others.
It seems a bit odd to take one service in isolation, though - the cost of digitally distributing Office, or any other piece of expensive software, is nothing like the purchase price, yet the price is not challenged. It seems odd to view the cost of an SMS in isolation, since it hides from view the cost of building an infrastructure (in the case of long-established players, the risk of entering the market in the first place), the cost of running it, the cost of winning the spectrum from the government and paying each you to use it and so on - all of which are necessary for SMS.
(you'll also get into odd market definition debates for this - is a mobile network a monopoly on the basis that it has control over the termination of messages on its network? If so, even if the networks wanted to charge a lowered price across the board, they would be taking a competition law risk if they agreed to change their pricing, since that's an agreement between competitors. If one party changes it pricing, to offer wholesale termination at a lower rate, and no-one else does, they're at a disadvantage competitively - that's *because* the market is competitive, not because competition is lacking.)
Distributing Office isn't a good analogy; sending emails would be better. They aren't zero-cost to the ISP's and yet they don't charge extra for them.
You've said it's a competitive market but then you say that at least in termination charges networks can't actually compete. That's where legislation can help; it removes the need for competitors to agree pricing amongst themselves :o)