At 1:20 pm +0900 on 20/11/03 Gerhard Fasol wrote:
> So each: AU, Vodafone, and DoCoMo have roaming
> solutions, every carrier's roaming solution
> is different.
This I realize and thus, until now, none of them offered an ideal solution for me.
> It's not at all that Vodafone Global Passport
> is the only carrier with a roaming solution!!!
As far as I can tell, only Vodafone offers a dual-mode, tri-band handset. All of the others require at least getting another handset. This is what I was trying to avoid.
I'm also assuming that Vodafone has roaming agreements with carriers in North America. If that is so, then I can use just this handset both here in Japan and in North America. In any case, I'm going to check out the details on Vodafone's roaming coverage.
> All Japanese carriers have multiple roaming
> solutions now - it's not at all that Vodafone
> is the only one. It's only that Vodafone is
> emphasizing roaming in their marketing, so you
> might think they are the only ones, but this
> is not so.
I didn't think that Vodafone was the only carrier offering international roaming. But, the fact that they play up this feature implies to me that they are offering something "better" than the others.
Case in point: As pointed out on your web site, NTT does offer a dual-mode (PDC/GSM) handset. But, the last time I looked more than a year ago, trying to find information about this phone on their web site was next to impossible. I actually stumbled across it by accident. Perhaps because it is 2G and it might make their 3G foma look bad. <grin>
Maybe with the international roaming competition from KDDI/au and Vodafone, NTT has made it easier for consumers to roam. I'll have to follow up on that.
> You can find a short listing of the roaming
> situation here:
> http://www.eurotechnology.com/3G/
Thank you for pointing me to the link. It's nice to see a summarized view of what's available. Still, I can't understand why roaming charges are still high. Why is that so? The cost for hard/software to provide international roaming services has dropped, yet the roaming charges still remain high.
I suspect that the agreements are so convoluted and complex to implement that the operators artifically keep the roaming prices high to discourage all but the business users. <grin>
cheers,
---eric
--
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Eric Bossieux eric@tti-jpn.com
Tel/Fax/Voicemail: +81-3-6644-0434
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Received on Thu Nov 20 07:33:47 2003