Is the Data Roaming Rip-off a Myth?

This is not quite the piece it started out as. I originally wrote a piece that went as follows…

I’m going away for a few days soon, somewhere warm and sunny, so well away from the UK, obviously. So I sat messing around with my phone the other day, playing around with a few apps, all of them from Google as it happened. Earth, Goggles and Translate. All very clever in their own way, and all potentially useful when you’re travelling to a foreign country. So you want to eat in a quiet restaurant frequented more by locals than tourists, but you don’t understand the menu? That’ll be Google Goggles then. Just take a photo of the section of the menu you want to know about and it will have a pretty good go at translating it into English for you.

Or maybe the waiter doesn’t do much English, and is trying to explain the menu to you in their own language. Time for Google Translate to step in. Launch the app, pass them your phone, ask them to speak into it, and hey presto! Seconds later, there’s a good chance that you’ll know what they are saying. Better still, you can reverse the trick. Answer them in English, again via the app, and the phone will speak your response in a local accent so good you could never dream of achieving it yourself.

Safe in the comfort of my own home, on my own data plan, these apps are just fantastic. But there is a problem. Because when you speak the phrase you need translating into Google Translate and it comes up with the ‘Working’ symbol, what the app is doing is passing the phrase to Google’s servers, where the real processing power lies, in order for them to analyze what you said, and perform the translation, in just a few seconds.

And therein lies the problem. Because if using these apps involves invoking a data connection, then I, like many other people, won’t go anywhere near them, except in extremis, during the time that I’m out of the country.
Data roaming charges have fallen, of course, but only because the European Commission passed legislation to make it happen. A couple of months ago, the Commission released a report that said that average consumer prices for data roaming had fallen, from €3.62 (£3.01) per Megabyte (MB) to €2.66 at the end of 2009. At the end of 2009, operators were charging each other an average of €0.55 per MB. That doesn’t look like a bad mark-up in my book.

So far, so good, and then the rest of the piece was going to turn into a bit of a rant at the operators for the rates they charge for data roaming, backing up my argument with a quote from Neelie Kroes, vice president for the Digital Agenda at the European Commission, who said a couple of months ago: “The cost of using mobile phones or devices when abroad in the EU has fallen continuously since the adoption of the first roaming rules. But three years since the rules came in, most operators propose retail prices that hover around the maximum legal caps. More competition on the EU roaming market would provide better choice and even better rates to consumers.”

I was then going to share my view that if operators reduced the cost of data roaming to what most people consider to be an acceptable level, data roaming usage would undoubtedly increase, and to such an extent that revenues and profits from data roaming would also increase, even if the operators were earning less per Megabyte. 

But then it all went horribly wrong. And it went wrong because at that point, I called my own operator, 3, to ask about the cost of data roaming in the EU. After the usual fight with the IVR system, I eventually got my answer: £1.25 per Megabyte.

It was at this point that I started thinking that I had wasted the last few minutes penning the article thus far. Because if 3 is only charging £1.25 per MB, then even at a wholesale rate of €0.55 (£0.46) per MB, perhaps they were not stinging me quite as much as I thought they were.

This led me to put some calls in to the other operators, at which point I realised, if I dare admit it, that the data roaming costs being charged by most UK operators, within the EU at least, are a lot more affordable than they used to be. £1 per Megabyte from Vodafone; £1.25 from 3, £1.50 from T-Mobile. For sure, they’re not giving it away, but it’s a lot better than it used to be.

O2 is still expensive at £3 per Megabyte, and Orange can work out equally expensive if you don’t tell them you want to use data, and buy a bundle, before you leave. But it could be, and indeed used to be, a lot worse.

So what next? Well maybe the UK mobile networks (with the exception of O2 at this point) have reached a point where they can begin to stop feeling embarrassed about the amount of money they charge us for checking email, and looking at social networking and other sites when we’re abroad. Maybe they can now start encouraging us to use our phone when we’re abroad (within the EU at least) just as we do when we’re at home, within reason.

I guess the missing piece of the jigsaw as far as I’m concerned is the fuel gauge. It’s an old chestnut, this one, but even if the charge per Megabyte is more reasonable, for me, there’s still an issue about what constitutes a Megabyte. Some of the networks are trying, in this respect. O2, despite being expensive, does offer a breakdown of what 50MB constitutes – 2,500 mobile-friendly web pages or 1,500 emails without attachments – from which you can deduce that 1MB is 50 mob-friendly web pages or 30 emails.

But to my mind, a fuel gauge display when I’m using a data service abroad to tell me how much data I’m consuming in real-time would not only set my mind at rest. It might actually make me realise that instead of going online for five minutes a day, I could actually stay online for 20, and still stay within my pre-bought data roaming bundle, or keep the costs at a reasonable level if I was paying by the Megabyte.

Operators, over to you.

David Murphy
Editor