Once upon a time, when business people traveled abroad, they were probably highly lucrative for mobile network operators because they were less afraid to use their mobile phone abroad for making phone calls back to their home country compared to ordinary users who would get a regular invoice every month to pay on their own.
These days, most business travelers carry a Blackberry or similar device to receive their e-mail while on the move. I guess that few of them disable the feature while abroad and just use the device just for making voice calls.
On the one hand it seems like a good opportunity for mobile network operators for additional revenues as data roaming is still quite costly to say the least. So that's a good thing, no? On the other hand, however, I wonder how many voice calls abroad are replaced by the e-mail capability and if the extra data roaming revenue actually compensates for it!?
So you business travelers out there reading this blog, how many voice calls abroad are replaced by your Blackberrie's e-mail capabilities?
email, SMS, IM, etc dominate by far over voice whether home or abroad.
I still make some voice calls, but not many, as data (email/messaging/Facebook/browsing) fulfils my needs. I heard the BB server uses very effective compression and I have never exceeded my 200MB roaming data allowance – without that I would probably revert to a fixed line.
Hello Martin
just take a look at the full PDF price lists of a few operators and you’ll get the picture. In NL for example, T-Mobile charges 2 EUR/MB on regular flex contracts, which I find relatively reasonable, while Vodafone charges 10 EUR/MB. But for BlackBerry contracts, roaming data services, last time I checked (in January), were a whopping 20 EUR/MB!!
Regards,
Eridian