From: "Benjamin" <akabeni@yahoo.com>
[snip]
> As far as "Roaming is not important to most users only for corporate
> types" goes, I would say that there is a significant chicken and egg
> element in this argument. Why do most people not care about roaming ?
> Mainly because it is outrageously expensive and the benefits do not
> justify the cost.
[Caveat: we're talking intercontinental roaming, here, not transcontinental
roaming. Clearly, in Europe and the U.S., transcontinental roaming makes
sense.]
There is that element, I agree, but consider also that for a great many
people, the benefits would be negligible even if you paid them to use it.
Most people not traveling on business are vacationing -- if they had wanted
to burn up the airwaves talking with friends, family and pesky bosses, they
would have just stayed home.
On business? Your company pays for your mobile phone in the country being
visited. This is expensive? Well, so what? If you're on business,
presumably you're worth it. What's a little high-rate talking time compared
with all that jet fuel?
I think this egg is going to take a while to hatch. Making it cheap is
leaving money on the table in the case of business travelers, and of only
marginal value to most vacationers -- hence likely to yield only marginal
reward to the service providers.
> If roaming was reasonably priced and simple to use, then many people
> would use it and get to appreciate the benefits. Especially in a country
> like Japan where people like to travel overseas and many face the
> inability to communicate in English or local languages to hinder their
> overseas mobility, I believe that a reasonably priced roaming facility
> would soon become a service on the best selling list.
Unfortunately, time-zone differences also hinder the Japanese from
communicating even in Japanese with people back home, when they are in North
America or Europe.
I'd go with "more people would use it, and appreciate it, but it would
become significantly less profitable to the telcos in the process."
As for possible value-added applications, e.g.:
> Many restaurants and hotels overseas love their Japanese tourists and
> hire Japanese speaking staff, print Japanese info materials, prepare
> Japanese foods etc etc in order to entice them to keep coming. Mobile
> phone operators could well entice their Japanese roamers with premium
> services such as for example "tell us where you want to go on your
> cellphone and we talk to the taxi driver to make sure you'll get there"
> etc etc.
...I ask, "why do you need roaming for this?"
The tourguide service could give the tourist a prepaid non-roaming phone
with a menu of numbers that take the caller back *not* to the home country,
but to the tour operator's local base of operations (which, for that matter,
could also patch the user to an international line.) Doing this with
roaming adds little value. In fact, having the call center in Japan would
add costs, one would think. Call center staff would have to work odd hours;
costs are higher here generally. And which would you prefer -- an
interpreter living in Japan or one working in the very country you're
visiting?
With more and more Japanese willing to forgo the canned travel experience,
there is the opportunity for non-Japanese tour operators to provide such
value-added services even for Japanese not taking their tours. If they did
it with intercontinental roaming, though, they'd only be adding to their
operating costs while adding little real value. Competitors would eat their
lunch.
> I tend to think that the only true dampener on roaming is the outrageous
> cost, but there are more and more companies working on solutions to
> bring that cost down, so it is reasonable to assume that there will be
> progress.
Yes, but...are they working to bring *our* costs down? Or just *their*
costs?
Price competition plus inexorable technological advance would seem to make
cheap, widely available global romaing a fait accompli. But sometimes
market forces have to be forced to work, and moreover, forced to work by
governments that are loath to do so.
In fact, with more and more telecom companies trying to dig themselves out
of trouble, making global romaing cheap doesn't nearly guarantee that the
service will also be cheap. More likely, telcos will all agree that it
should remain expensive; and with so few consumers hurt by such a
cartelization -- especially since the various workarounds are generally
cheaper anyway -- I don't think you'd see strenuous regulatory action
against it. If anything, the various governments would just throw up their
hands and say, "yeah, it's gouging, sort of, but so were long-distance calls
for all those years, in a way; and it beats having to do a bailout, or its
moral equivalent....let 'em keep the money."
Don't get me wrong (or, as mini-George would say "...Make no mistake...").
I think global roaming is cool, and I think it's going to happen; I just I
don't see the pressures being so strong. The picture should remain
fragmented for some time to come.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Thu Oct 11 12:37:31 2001