The great roaming rip-off

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 21 October 2006 03:16

Opinion and Analysis

The rates for using a mobile phone overseas are notoriously high, but they've got nothing on roaming rates for cellular data services.

Take Vodafone's new HSDPA service, for example. Data rates in Australia are 30 cents per Mbyte (once plan quotas have been exceeded) and roaming overseas $10 per Mbyte, a 3,333 percent increase. No wonder they express it as one cent per kbyte: it sounds less painful that way.

However for roaming phone calls the most expensive charge, to make a call to a country other than Australia from the country you are visiting is $7.22 per minute Which is a mere 2400 percent increase on the 30 cent per minute cost (excluding flagfall) of the cheapest rate for Australian domestic calls that I could find on the Vodafone website. In most cases the difference is much less.

Yet for International data roaming all that is being provided by the host operator is Internet access. In other words, it's really the equivalent of making a domestic call within the country to which you are travelling: for which the highest rate Vodafone charges is $2.00 per minute, a 667 percent increase on its cheapest domestic rate.

I'm not trying to single out Vodafone, the charges just came to light with the announcement of their HSDPA service. I'm sure the others all charge around the same.

With these prices and with the high data rates of the new HSDPA service, users could quickly ramp up big bills. A throughput of one megabit per second is approximately six megabytes per minute. At one cent per kilobyte, this means that you could burn through cash at around $60 per minute!

When I put it to Vodafone that an HSDPA roamer could very quickly ramp up a big bill they suggested that, it some countries, it was possible to buy a prepaid SIM for use with the local data service and this could be better option for travellers on extended trips. Either that or finding a local WiFi hotspot. Anything rather than one cent per kbyte.