Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Sunday 27 September 2009, 6:46 PM
Extortion on the waves
Wouldn't disbelieve a word of it, guv, except for one thing. I was sitting at the very epicentre of networked wireless technology, and I couldn't even send an instant message from my phone.
Technically, there was no problem. My phone, the constantly pleasing Android-based G1, has no difficulty in speaking American airwaves, and it is stuffed to the gills with software that tweets, chatters, displays moving pictures, geolocates and so on and so forth. The problem was me: for some reason, I dislike being held to ransom and having my money extorted. And with T-Mobile wanting to charge me £7.50 a megabyte for data, there is no other way to describe data roaming charges.
Seven pounds fifty. A megabyte. My iGoogle home page? 300Kbytes? That'll be two pounds fifty. Just to see my own home page. A fiver to check ZDNet UK's home page (naughty of us to have pictures, I know).
It gets worse, of course, when you consider what the extra costs to T-Mobile are for data roaming. Using the Internet, of course, the local operator just has to hook me up to its local connection point, which it can economically do for its own customers for the usual amounts. In my case, that local operator was T-Mobile – who will also sell me hotspot access via Wi-Fi in San Francisco for eight dollars a day, no particular data limit mentioned.
Extortion isn't too strong a word, especially when you consider how competition has been so carefully excluded from the equation. I tried to do the smart thing and buy an American pay-as-you-go data-only SIM, but my handset is locked to TMob and the local TMob shop assured me that such a thing was "impossible".
I know that many, if not most, companies now forbid data roaming for their employees, because the charges can easily run into thousands of pounds for even moderate use. I know that none of the UK people I talked to at IDF were using data roaming – although some had unlocked handsets that allowed the "impossible" task of using local SIMs for data. And these are the people who are directly involved in creating the exciting new world of mobile which, we are assured, will push technology for the people into ever greater heights of electrowonder.
It doesn't matter how good and cheap the technology is, if you can't afford to use it because of extortion. And it is doubly painful when you're abroad, which is exactly when you most need all those wonderful online information tools.
I have been at parties with mobile phone executives who openly laugh about the rip-off of data roaming charges. That left a very bad taste. What baffles me is whether they've ever made the calculation of how much money they don't make – or are there so many thousand-pound bills floating around that they don't want to bother to collect a hundred ten-pound bills instead?
But the current state of affairs is wrong – criminally, caustically, catastrophically wrong. It is poisoning the hopes of the mobile Internet, it is showing up the lack of international regulation (three cheers here for the EU, which is slowly enforcing sanity on the robber cartels), it is massively stupid in a way only telcos can be massively stupid. It is an enormous insult to customers, developers and manufacturers. It spits in the face of the future. If anyone can suggest a way to break this conspiracy down, I'm more than ready to hear it.
And if anyone from T-Mobile would like to explain to me why it is right to charge me five pounds to look at a single web page, I would love to hear that too. Bring it on.
PreviousComments on this post
Yes to bloody right! and its not just limited to mobile networks its the same with every industry in the western world more so in Britain, no one seems to have grasped the idea of making profits through quantity and not the few.
This was what the MP expenses fiasco was all about mp's where claiming for that much they had no grasp of real world expenses, the rest of us here on planet earth have to pay.
Bring back Cromwell I say.
Well said Rupert, it's a frustration we all have to deal with. Incidentally, it's not just roaming rates that are extortionate - I have recently had a horrified in-law pleading with me to disable the mobile ISP connection on her phone. She'd happily been using the nokia maps application which of course was downloading data. Now that's fine unless you're on a call & text package that has no data bundled with it. The novelty of the new phone lasted until the first bill, and she now despises the mobile network responsible for fleecing her, and is intent on changing operator the moment the contract expires.
This story will strike a chord with many travellers. Although you have focused on T-Mobile's charging - euphemistically described on their website as "Surfing the web abroad used to be pretty pricey - but things have changed." - all of the UK operators are guilty of the same crime.
A couple of weeks ago I checked the rates from the leading operators and found the following...
Vodafone - £14.99 for the first 3MB and then the next 22MB are 'free'!?
Orange - £8 per MB
O2 - start at £4.50 per MB (although specific details are very hard to find on their website)
What I found particularly frustrating is that none of the operators seem to offer widely available 'add-ons' that allow a customer to pay an upfront charge for data roaming when they know they are going away (similar to the voice and texts options they currently offer). Has anyone found a deal like this?
So what will break down this conspiracy? Well in the absence of a global regulator it looks like we will have to rely on market forces. However, the operators will happily persist with their cartel-like approach to pricing as it is one of the last areas of use where they are making significant margins - so what else?
My only theory is sketchy at best - but it seems to need a market entrant that disrupts the current pricing model. The best analogy is the bulk buyers of international mobile airtime (e.g. Lebaramobile) that have radically reduced the cost of calling internationally by targeting specific ethnic groups with niche SIM based products. If one of these competitors could work out a way to bulk buy data from the leading operators and then resell it back to consumers they would be able to undercut the current rates and introduce proper competition. But the practicalities of doing this for data are far more complex than voice.. that is where my theory runs out of steam!
However - definitely a just cause to pursue!
I know so many people who've junked their operators having got an unexpectedly large data bill - especially when they didn't realise they were using data in the first place. But then, when you're used to paying £30 a month for everything, have two days abroad, send three emails and look at three web pages, and come back to a £120 bill, it's hard to feel warmly towards the people who've just duped you.
I can't see any way for a competitor to get into the GSM cartel with substantially reduced data pricing. I can see ways that a concerted name-and-shame effort, run internationally and aimed at the regulators, could have an effect. That would need some media outfit with international reach, industry savvy and a range of outlets... mmmm, now, let me think...
I like the name and shame idea. How about issuing a call to readers to collect the best (maybe that should be worst!) examples of bill shock involving data roaming. What would be very useful would be to get a clear idea of how much this data roaming costs the operators, obviously they pay CTRs for calls that cross networks, but what is the deal for data? I would wager that the margin between the cost to the operator and the cost to the user will be substantially different...
This could then be tied up with an argument based on how much these costs are stifling business and reducing productivity - ironically improving productivity is one of the main platforms that operators use to promote the data based tools...
I'm sorry, i just don't believe that name and shame will work.
They have already been named - they will never be ashamed.
Unlocked phones and disposable sims are the best answer I can come up with.
I wonder if it is possible for a 3rd party operator to cheaply "link" 2 international phone accounts - for call and SMS forwarding?
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