Since the legislation came into force about a month ago, many UK mobile network operators have made a song and dance about their new and cheaper roaming calls and sms prices (declaring them as if they decided to give customers gift of cheap roaming calls on our european ski holidays) but……
… the significant reduction in data roaming costs has yet to be passed on to consumers.
If I’m in a ski resort using roaming data while skiing in the French alps, O2 pays the French mobile company a max of ?1 for every megabyte I use – this French company is providing all of the mobile infrastructure for me to do this – O2 still charges me ?2.99 (?4) per megabyte, yet all they are providing is a billing process! (not the cell base stations or mobile 3G infrastructure I used up in the alpine ski resorts)
You can now buy a ?50 “bolt on” which gives you 50MB (ie ?1 per megabyte) but its a fixed price, so is clearly only this cheap if you use exactly 50MB – and you can’t buy more than one in each month, so a high skier is back up to paying the ?2.99 per month for all data over 50MB.
O2 is by no means alone – in fact they are often the most forward thinking re roaming data – the industry continues to stunt its own potentially explosive growth.
Essentially they are still trying to get away with mugging roaming data users – the first company to offer honest good value here will make a killing – but the fact that none has yet is very suspicious…
All of this sounds bad for the world’s first complete ski resort guide designed for mobile web – it’s not a problem for American skiers on vacation in the USA but, as you imagine, when a Brit is skiing they are probably in another country… roaming!
For this reason sno have designed the site with tiny data size so their users can’t get a bill shock, but really it should be as good as free to surf a site with approx 20kb per page – in ANY country!