The article misses the fact that telcos are about to raise prices locally in return.
Personally, I welcome this step since plans are cheap as hell in most countries anyway compared to, say, the US.
back
3 comments
Not sure about that, it has not happened after the last few price-limitations that were issued in recent years.
If mobile internet is 50-100x more expensive beyond national borders I will simply not use it, it's a lose-lose deal (that is hard for the market to escape from, due to the large fragmentation).
The telcos make a small fortune every time a business traveller runs up thousands of Euros/Pounds/etc (often at the expense of their employer's shareholders). It's not surprising if the telcos increase everyone's fees a bit if this money is no longer coming in.
And I'm fine with that. Overall, it means previously underutilised capacity will finally be used. 99% of people were unable to use all mobile broadband when abroad, despite it being cheap and abundant. Now they can.
I read somewhere in some other coverage of this reform that the measures were expected to drain about 2% from telcos' revenues. Even if they raise their prices by 5% (which isn't given), that's (a) still a decent deal if you travel ever (but unfair that non-travellers would end up subsidising travellers) (b) quickly eaten up by the continuously falling prices of mobile plans.
"subsidising travellers"? If anything the travellers must be subsidising the non-travellers now. A couple of megabytes of data do not cost hundreds of dollars to move just because you have to route through one more network.
That's true. I believe providers exchange significant amounts of money from multilateral roaming agreements, and all that potential profit has to come from somewhere else.
What I'd like to see are providers charging a low fee for travellers to use their networks. Local users will subsidise travellers less in this case.
If they can raise them (without lowering the number of calls), why haven't they done so by now?