(keitai-l) Re: Roaming

I live in California and recently visited Australia. My local network
provider charges me about $2.50 per minute for international roaming plus
long-distance charges of about $2.50 a minute. So to call home from
Australia costs me about $5 per minute on my GSM phone.

By buying a pre-paid simm card, I was able to call back home for 20 minutes
for less than $10 Australian. In other words, $0.25US vs $5.00, a 20X markup
for somone.

I cant believe roaming is such a rip-off in Asia or Europe. I know people
who live in Taiwan and use a Hong Kong phone, so they cant be paying all
that much extra for 'roaming'.

-jim munro

-----Original Message-----
From: Maria Pienaar [mailto:maria.pienaar@solidtech.com]
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 5:01 AM
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: Roaming


On Friday, October 12, 2001 Graham Brown wrote:

> I would assume someone like Vodafone would be prime contender for such a
service given the 40-odd network subsidiaries
> they have worldwide. They are on a drive to standardise the networks
currently with brand & centralised purchasing so
> this would make sense on a strategic level.

Vodafone has tried central purchasing many times in the past and it has
failed a number of times for obvious reasons such as different customs and
excise, various taxes and potential political links with some vendors in
some countries in the various regions. Centralized purchasing and
standardization of network and handset vendors in a global market is a very
complex and potential more costly model to implement. They may be successful
in centralizing the brand but I doubt they will be successful in centralized
purchasing and one standard. At this stage it looks like they will at least
have WCDMA and some CDMA networks. It does not look like Verizon will more
to WCDMA anytime soon.

Maria



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