Roaming Cracks

Last week has brought us some positive developments of mobile data roaming prices.

From my own backyard. Orange Poland started offering the Travel Data Daily package. It is activated by sending an SMS message AKT TRAVEL to 573 and gives 2MB worth of data in the Eurozone for 8PLN (~2EUR). While 2MB is a ridiculously small package by today standards, the price is an order of magnitude lower compared to standard data roaming. Interestingly, I found 2MB enough for a day with my BlackBerry Torch, having emails, Facebook and moderate Web browsing. Probably the compression BlackBerry servers do helps here.

At the same time Vodafone UK announced even better offer. For 2GBP a day they allow to "take the home data plan abroad", which means one could have a couple of gigabytes worth of roaming data. 2EUR or 2GBP a day is an expense most of us smartphone users would afford when traveling. Vodafone has probably figured out smartphone users are smart (surprise!) and turn off data when roaming. So it is better to get 2GBP than nothing.

While still far from home data pricing, the new options are the very welcome cracks in the wall of outrageous mobile data roaming prices.

As a post scriptum and a follow up to the last week's post, spending a week in Austria, I run out of the A1 b.free prepaid data package and was not able to recharge it staying in the small town of Lanersbach. I had my PayPal and my credit card ready to be charged, but A1 did not want my money. I ended giving up Web access from my laptop for a couple of days. A clear example of money lying on a street, the MNOs not willing to pick...