Ordinary Gweilo

I regard the charges for using a mobile phone overseas (international roaming) as a big rip-off, as I’ve mentioned before, so I was interested by this report in The Guardian on Tuesday:

The mobile phone company 3 will attempt today to head off a possible clampdown by the European commission on the prices that operators charge to call abroad, with a new tariff that charges customers as if they were still in their home market.

3 will announce that when its customers go abroad and “roam” on one of the company’s other networks, they will not be charged to receive calls, and any calls or video calls they make, or texts and picture messages they send, will be charged at home rate. The service will operate in Britain, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy and Sweden.

My first thought was that this would make the 3 network (owned by Hutchison Whampoa) very attractive for international travellers, and then I wondered whether this would apply to Hong Kong subscribers.  Apparently it will, from later this year (SCMP – subscription required or there’s a BBC report), but the details have not been published.

The charge they make if you receive a call when abroad is the biggest rip-off, and it seems that 3 do intend to abolish this – as long as you use their network in one of the countries where they operate.  Calls back to your home network will be charged as if you were at home, but it’s not clear how much they will charge for calls made within the country you are visiting (i.e. a Hong Kong subscriber calling a UK number when they are in the UK), but I don’t think that’s part of the deal.

The problem, of course, is that 3 only operates in a rather small number of countries, so it won’t be useful for everyone.  If Vodafone were to offer something similar that would be far more significant, but they probably aren’t as desparate as 3.  However, I expect that competitive pressure and the availability of alternatives (so-called ‘Call Forward Roaming’) will eventually force all operators to offer something more reasonable.