Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 13 August 2008 16:35
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
International mobile roaming tariffs are back on the agenda with the completion of the KPMG report commissioned by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy for the House of Representatives' parliamentary inquiry. But are some analysts pointing us in the wrong direction?
It seems to me that Ovum senior consultant Craig Skinner is missing the point when he says "Through regulatory action within Australia, we can only directly influence the wholesale charge Australian mobile carriers apply to inbound roamers and the retail markup on outbound roaming calls."
Is that true?
The government could quite easily introduce legislation to limit roaming charges applied to Australian subscribers while overseas. It would then be up to local mobile carriers to strike deals with their counterparts in each market that would allow them to comply.
The worst that can happen is that roaming may not be available in some countries, but I'm not sure that would be an entirely bad thing.
Given the extremely low per-minute international rates available on calling cards and VoIP services - not to mention certain fixed-line carriers - the prevailing system of charging for roaming is untenable. There are some steps in the right direction such as
Vodafone's Traveller and 3's "3 Like Home" tariffs, but the idea of paying a dollar a minute surcharge seems way beyond reasonable to me.
Someone placing a call in Australia is already paying a premium to call a mobile number, so I can see no good reason why the charge to the mobile subscriber travelling overseas should be any more than the market price for international carriage - a cent or two per minute. The local mobile carrier isn't faced with the costs of terminating the call, so the mobile premium can be remitted to the overseas mobile carrier.
Please turn to page two, where I'll explain why I think Skinner's argument about price elasticity is a misinterpretation of what's really happening.
