GigaOM » Roaming

Truphone creates a shared data plan that will cross international borders

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:01:02 +0000

Truphone has always had a soft spot for the international business traveler. When it became a virtual mobile carrier in 2010, its core service was a plan that charged you local rates for voice, SMS and data on either side of the Atlantic – a boon to any globetrotter accustomed to paying exorbitant roaming fees outside his home country. Now Truphone is extending more love to border-crossing businessmen and women – or at least to the companies that pay their phone bills.

On Tuesday Truphone is unveiling its first shared plans for business. Companies can now buy big batches of minutes, texts and megabytes and pool them across not just multiple devices, but also multiple nations. For instance a $500 plan includes 5000 voice minutes, 5000 text messages and 1 GB of 3G data, all of which can be used anywhere in the U.S., U.K. Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong. Germany, Poland and Spain will join that list later this year.

Those prices will definitely seem high to most of us since we’re accustomed paying only for the for the domestic-only voice and data buckets offered by our local carriers. But if you’re splitting your time between countries in the Truphone “Zone” those rates look like a bargain. Anyone who has ever opened their mobile browser overseas can attest to international data roaming rates being practically criminal — $20 a megabyte isn’t uncommon.

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International data roaming is broken. Can MVNOs fix it?

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:34:49 +0000

Let’s face it: if you use your phone or tablet’s mobile Internet connection while travelling abroad, well, you’re screwed. Standard roaming rates for most operators can run upwards of $20 a megabyte. Some carriers will sell you a bucket of megabytes, but the going rates are still 10 to 20 times higher than what you’d typically pay for mobile data on a standard plan.

If you’re lucky enough to have an unlocked phone with GSM and HSPA radios, you can buy another carrier’s SIM card service when you arrive at your destination and pay local rates. If you’re really determined, you could rent a smartphone or mobile hotspot. Whatever option you choose you have to be prepared to either pay an exorbitant amount of money or go through an enormous hassle – sometimes both.

To put it simply, international data roaming is broken, and no U.S. carrier seems to be lifting a finger to fix it. They seem to prefer the miserable status quo to the headaches required to repair the system. But where the network operators are falling down, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) are picking up the slack.

As its name implies, an MVNO doesn’t have a network of its own. Instead they buy minutes and data capacity from traditional carriers, and resell them under their own brands and pricing plans. While most MVNOs tend to work in a single country with a single carrier, there’s nothing preventing them from buying capacity on multiple networks in multiple countries and then selling international access to a customer in a single pricing plan.

Companies like Tep Wireless and XCom Global are doing just that, renting out mobile hotspots to European-bound travellers that they can take across borders. Both will save you a lot of money if you’re a globetrotting heavy data user, but they’re by no means cheap, charging upwards of $15 a day if you opt for unlimited data packages.

London-based Voiamo, however, is thinking bigger with a new service called GlobalGig. Instead of just renting you a hotspot and selling you a temporary plan when you travel, it proposes to replace your current country-limited 3G or 4G modem plan with a service that will work in multiple countries with a single pricing plan. Its rates are a comparable to the prices most of the major carriers charge for hotspot plans — starting at $25 for 1 GB a month and up to $50 for 5 GB — but those rates are good for the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

In the U.S., GlobalGig uses Sprint’s network, while in the U.K. and Australia it uses the 3 and Optus networks, but it is negotiating deals with carriers in other countries and plans to expand its global footprint soon, Voiamo CEO and founder Nigel Bramwell said. Its $120 hotspot — which can connect up to five devices through Wi-Fi — can support networks in 100 different countries, Bramwell said. As GlobalGig adds more carriers to its roster it will periodically send out new SIM cards to its customers, expanding their coverage to new countries.

If you’re an frequent international traveller, GlobalGig would be an ideal service especially if you already regularly use a mobile hotspot, but there are some limitations. The biggest is that the device can only access Sprint’s 1X and EV-DO networks. That means fairly slow data speeds compared to the LTE, HSPA+ and even WiMAX broadband service offered by other carriers. But Bramwell said GlobalGig’s next generation device will support all major global LTE networks. If that’s the case, the company will have something truly powerful on its hands: a 4G data service that knows no borders.

Voiamo may soon have some company in the global roaming market. Last month at a conference, Sprint MVNO Voyager Mobile revealed it has plans in the works to offer international voice and data plans, which charged the same rates whether home or abroad. Robert Gaal, the CEO of recently launched mobile broadband MVNO Karma, told me that his company might expand its social bandwidth model to other countries as well. Gaal, who is from and regularly visits the Netherlands, is increasingly frustrated with carrier roaming policies, said the only restriction to going international is finding inexpensive devices that support multiple 4G bands and technologies.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr User bredgur; SIM cards image courtesy of Flickr user mroach

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Court sides with FCC over Verizon in fight over data roaming

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:39:23 +0000

Verizon Wireless fought the Federal Communications Commission, and the FCC won -– at least for now. The U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., has unanimously upheld the FCC’s requirements that big operators make their mobile broadband networks available to smaller players through roaming agreements.

When the FCC instituted the rules last year, Verizon protested vehemently against them, arguing they were unnecessary regulation and that carriers should be free to strike up roaming contracts with whomever they pleased. The court, however, sided with the commission and carrier groups that backed it.

After the ruling Verizon issued the following statement: “Today’s ruling upheld rules that require carriers to offer data roaming on commercially reasonable terms. As we made clear throughout the case, Verizon Wireless regularly enters into such data roaming agreements on commercially reasonable terms to meet the needs of consumers, and will continue to do so.”

As you might expect, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski hailed the decision, as his was one of three Democratic votes that put the rules in place. “This unanimous decision confirms the FCC’s authority to promote broadband competition and protect broadband consumers,” Genachowski said in a statement. “Our rules have empowered consumers and expanded their ability to enjoy the benefits of seamless and nationwide access to mobile data services, including wireless Internet and e-mail.”

The rules state that rural or regional operator that wants to get access to any of the nationwide operators’ 3G and 4G networks are guaranteed access on “commercially reasonable terms,” though they’re not very specific on what constitutes reasonable. Theoretically carriers should be able to use such roaming deals to offer nationwide data service just they use such contracts for nationwide voice service. While there may be no regulatory barriers to those deals there are certainly technology ones.

Steve Berry, CEO of the Competitive Carriers Association, said the unanimous decision from the appeals court was a good sign that the FCC’s efforts to promote more mobile competition will have backing from all corners of government.

“CCA and our members have worked long and hard to successfully prosecute the Data Roaming Order since its inception to intervening in support of the Commission before the court,” Berry said in a statement. “This is a decisive victory for consumers and an extremely positive outcome for competitive carriers and competitive policies.”

In other regulatory news, Dish Network appears to have acquiesced to FCC pressure that set aside some of its satellite spectrum if it wants to get permission to use it for a terrestrial 4G network. FierceWireless reports that Dish is now willing to set aside 5 MHz of its total 40 MHz for a “guard band” against interference and nearby cellular spectrum. Only last month was Dish railing against the proposed limitations on its licenses.

Photo courtesy of Flickruser [steakpinball].

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Thanks to telecom oligopolies, it’s always raining in the cloud

Mathew Ingram — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:35:37 +0000

There are plenty of ways to become outraged about the state of affairs in global communications, but one of the easiest is to travel to a foreign country and try to use your smartphone like a normal person — in other words, check your location on a map, get your email, send text messages, take photos and upload them, check into location apps, and so on. Depending on your carrier, the penalty for doing so ranges from serious inconvenience to something that resembles being mugged in a dark alley. In order to avoid this, you have to act like a criminal yourself by hacking your phone, or pay even more fees so you can get around using your carrier’s network. Welcome to the telecom industry’s version of the cloud, where it’s always raining.

Traveling to the United States from Canada (where I live) is bad enough, unless you have a special plan from your carrier that charges you only slightly more than the usual excessive rates. But going to Europe — which I did for GigaOM’s recent Structure: Europe conference in Amsterdam — makes even that look like a day at the beach. The typical carrier plan for international travel is almost ridiculously expensive for even trivial behavior, and if you want to make use of virtually any cloud-based services, even long-established ones like email or messaging, you will pay rates that make the old days of feudal servitude to the king seem like a vacation.

A monthly data package lasted less than an hour

To give just one example, I did what I thought I was supposed to do when I landed in Amsterdam: I bought a $50 “international data pack” from my carrier on my phone, a package that was supposed to include enough bandwidth to last me a month. I assumed this would be more than enough, because I was only going to be in Amsterdam for a week. In reality, I used the entire package in less than an hour — in fact, it wasn’t even enough to get me from the airport to my hotel, which is a half-hour trip. In that time, I checked email several times, looked at Google Maps to check my location (and find the hotel) and checked Twitter once.

In other words, I did things that any traveler might do. I didn’t download any HD movies or use my phone as a wireless hotspot or anything out of the ordinary. Based on that estimate, my week in Amsterdam could easily have cost me thousands of dollars, for something approaching my natural usage of cloud services. In fact, I actually wound up getting lost trying to find the hotel, in part because I was afraid to check Google Maps again. And so, telecom companies have succeeded in the kind of behavior modification usually done with animals: an electric shock is applied for any unwanted activity, to the point where you simply choose not do it.

In the end, I borrowed an unlocked phone from a friend (since my carrier doesn’t let me unlock my phone before the end of my contract without a penalty) and bought a local SIM card. That card gave me 15 times as much data as my own carrier did, for less than half the price. I should note that this is a provider I have been with for more than a decade, whom I pay monthly for a range of services including cable TV, broadband internet, five cellphones and a home VOIP service — and a complete stranger in an airport halfway around the world gave me 15 times the data for half the price my provider was prepared to.

And it’s not just me and my Canadian phone company. While at Structure, I spoke with a man who has been an advisor to some of the largest phone companies in the world, and he admitted that after his last trip abroad, he got a bill for more than 3,000 Euros — and he confessed that he had absolutely no idea what those charges were for. He had turned off all of his data-using apps, the ones which upload user information automatically to the cloud (Runkeeper, Apple’s Photostream, etc.) and tried to avoid doing anything like using maps. And yet, he was being asked to pay 20 times what a normal monthly cellphone plan would cost.

Market control results in economic rent

Why do we put up with this kind of thing? The simple answer is that we have no choice. In most cases, users get to choose between one or two — or possibly three — carriers, all of whom charge roughly the same for their services, especially for things like data roaming and text messaging. This is what is known as a cartel, or at the very least an oligopoly. And the reason why these companies charge thousands of times as much as it actually costs to transmit a megabyte of data is also simple: because they can.

Telecom carriers have lots of easy explanations for this kind of thing: foreign roaming agreements are expensive, they have to offset their investment in new technology, they need to subsidize handsets, and so on. But the reality is that they have virtually zero incentive to charge lower prices — they already control enough of the market to dictate terms. In order to provide cable and telephone service early on, many governments essentially gave carriers the future on a silver platter, and now there is no way around them. Like a feudal lord, the carriers served the king faithfully and now get to reap the benefits in perpetuity.

This is known as “economic rent” — meaning he who controls the market gets to set the rent. And in an age when web-based services have become such a huge part of our lives, there is an inevitable clash between our desire to use things like maps, email, text messaging and social networks and the carriers’ desire to continue making the kind of profit margins they have grown used to. And consumers are trapped in the middle.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Alexander Vaughan

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Why the Verizon iPhone 5 is a globetrotter’s best friend

Kevin Fitchard — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:03:48 +0000

It used to be the case that if you traveled extensively overseas, Verizon Wireless was the last carrier you wanted to sign a long-term contract with at home. Not only were its CDMA phones incompatible with the GSM networks used in most other countries, but also its lack of SIM cards meant you were stuck paying whatever ridiculous international roaming rates Verizon charged.

That all ends with the iPhone 5. The CDMA version of the device is not only the most internationally versatile of the different carrier variants, but it also has a SIM card slot, which Big Red is keeping unlocked, a Verizon spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Post. That means a Verizon iPhone 5 owner can go anywhere in the world, insert another carrier’s SIM card, and be up and running.

Of Apple’s three iPhone variants, the CDMA version is truly the global phone. Not only does it support Verizon, Sprint and Asian operators’ CDMA networks, but it contains the GSM and HSPA radios used by the majority of the world’s remaining carriers as well as long list of international LTE bands. But supporting a lot of bands means little if you can’t afford to use them. In most cases, international data roaming rates are so expensive, tapping into a foreign 4G LTE network or even a high-speed HSPA+ would be financial suicide.

But with an unlocked SIM slot, customers can always opt to pay local rates by buying a local SIM card. Typically carriers will manually unlock a device for you, but only after your contract expires or you’ve satisfied certain conditions of your service agreement. Verizon doesn’t seem to care whose network you connect to as long as you keep paying your monthly bill.

That unlock policy extends to other U.S. networks as well so technically you could insert an AT&T or T-Mobile nano-SIM into a Verizon iPhone and access their networks (presumably you could do the same with a Sprint LTE SIM, but you wouldn’t get access to its voice or 3G networks). That means if you broke your contract with Verizon you could immediately activate it on a competing network.

Keep in mind though that if you switched carriers, you wouldn’t have access to all networks. AT&T’s LTE network runs on a different 4G band, which requires a different iPhone 5 variant. T-Mobile won’t have LTE until next year, and even then its networks are designed to work with the AT&T version. Starting this year, though, all versions of the iPhone 5 will run over T-Mobile’s newly reconfigured 42 Mbps HSPA+ network.

Image courtesy of Flickr User bredgur

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Small and medium-sized carriers join forces to combat AT&T and Verizon

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:48:28 +0000

The Rural Cellular Association has officially changed its name to the Competitive Carriers Association, embracing the rather awkward reality that distinctly non-rural operators like Sprint, T-Mobile and MetroPCS now make up its membership. The battle lines were drawn a long time ago, but now the lineup is official: it’s AT&T and Verizon against the rest of the US mobile industry.

CCA President and CEO Steve Berry said the organization isn’t abandoning its rural carrier roots, rather it’s acknowledging the new reality: that big nationwide operators like Sprint and T-Mobile have more in common with their tiny regional counterparts than they do with the country’s two wireless superpowers. The sum of the subscribers supported by the RCA’s members is about 100 million, which is pretty much the size of either Ma Bell or Big Red individually.

Sprint and T-Mobile won’t be able to dominate the organization, Berry said. “We are one carrier, one vote, and we have a board that reflects our composition,” Berry said. And conflicts between the big and small contingencies should be minimal given how their interests are now closely aligned, Berry said. They share the common goals of ensuring equal access to new 4G spectrum, interoperability between the bands, and mutually beneficial roaming agreements, he said.

So why now? Verizon and AT&T have long been the dominant carriers in the industry.

Berry said the differences between AT&T and Verizon and the rest of the market became most pronounced in recent years as acquisitions swelled their size. Verizon’s 2009 purchase of Alltel eliminated the single largest regional operator in the US, but it was AT&T’s attempted purchase of T-Mobile that really rallied the remaining wireless carriers against the Big 2. In an interview last year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said that the merger attempt woke the industry up regarding the “gradual creep toward becoming a duopoly.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Everett Collection

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Verizon turns on Razrs’ GSM radios, pushes out Android 4.0 upgrade

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:37:09 +0000

We knew international roaming was coming to Verizon’s LTE phones – the GSM radios shipped in many of its LTE handsets were just sitting there dormant – but on Friday, Verizon is finally turning them on in two of its devices, the Motorola Razr and the Razr Maxx, as part of the same update that will upgrade those handsets to Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich.

Verizon will start pushing out the update today, according to a blog post on Verizon’s site, giving customers access to new features such as Face Unlock and access to key applications, including the camera and dialer, from the phone’s lock screen. My colleague Kevin Tofel gives a full rundown of ICS’s features here.

Though the GSM radios will now be active, customers must still pay international rates, which aren’t cheap. Even if you subscribe to Verizon’s $5 a month global value plan, a 1 minute call in the U.K. will still cost $1, and prices go as high as $5 per minute in other countries. The phones will be able to access GPRS/EDGE/HSPA data networks as well, though be prepared for bill shock, as international data rates are even more exorbitant than voice rates.

Verizon does offer international data roaming plans that will help you manage your data spending, but these aren’t cheap either. A 100 MB plan will run you $25, which works out to roughly $250 a gigabyte.

One twist on Verizon’s LTE devices is they have SIM cards. Theoretically you could swap out your domestic SIM card for an international one and pay the same rates as a local in any foreign country. Verizon hasn’t stated whether it will let customers use that capability or if it will lock phones down to their SIMs.

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5 cable companies cut the cord, offer free Wi-Fi roaming

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:46:24 +0000

A wireless network comprised of 50,000 free hotspots will appear in the coming months, but there’s a small catch: To use the free Wi-Fi service, you’ll need to be a subscriber to one of five cable television providers. On Monday, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable jointly announced the CableWiFi network. Customers of one provider can seamlessly roam on hotspots from other four as a result of the news.

Most of the new roaming functionality will be in New York City and the surrounding Tri-State area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, and Philadelphia as those areas have overlapping cable and Wi-Fi coverage. The group will be adding more cities and coverage areas, however. Signing in to a Wi-Fi network out of your home coverage area should be seamless: You’ll simply use the same credentials as you would on your own cable operator’s network.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, not only will consumers be happy with this broader Wi-Fi coverage, but so too will the mobile broadband network providers: Free Wi-Fi — even from someone else’s hotspot network — helps to offload data from 3G and 4G networks. Single sign-on while roaming on different networks makes this an easy win for consumers while cable providers can use the expanded coverage as a marketing perk to attract new consumers.

Sounds like a win all around to me and to my colleague Stacey, who said this two years ago after speaking to the folks at BelAir Networks, maker of wireless solutions, and now owned by Ericsson:

“So will ISPs take the consumer love of ubiquitous broadband and carriers’ need for offload to the next level and create the equivalent of roaming agreements for Wi-Fi? Greg Williams, the new SVP of corporate development at Bel Air Networks, thinks they might. …He wonders if carriers will negotiate with each other and fixed-line ISPs to get access for their wireless subscribers, especially in congested cities such as New York or San Francisco.”

Two years later, and it looks like the Wi-Fi roaming revolution is well underway. Be sure to bring your smartphone or tablet with you to get on board!

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Confirmed: European mobile data roaming costs to fall

David Meyer — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:07:53 +0000

Terrific news for anyone living in the EU — the cost of voice, text and now data use while travelling within the continent is about to fall drastically.

With 578 votes to 10, the European Parliament almost unanimously voted through a new roaming regulation on Thursday. This will be the first time that there’s a retail cap on data roaming within the EU.

App providers around the world should also be delighted to hear that, since the move should lead to a hefty rise in mobile internet usage there — in particular, for content and location-based services. But mobile operators will be furious, as they have lashed out before at the European Commission’s proposals, but to no avail.

From the EC’s side, high roaming charges are a barrier to both the Holy Grail-like single market and free movement within the continent.

By putting price caps on data we have created a roaming market for the smartphone generation,” digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said. “More than that, we have ended the rip-offs familiar to anyone who has used a mobile phone while travelling abroad. I am pleased that year after year the European Union is putting money back in the pockets of citizens.”

Data-roaming charges have been coming down in recent years – around 75 percent since 2007 – but not nearly enough when you consider that the actual cost of providing such services is between 1-3 euro cents per megabyte, far, far lower than most people get charged. Operators throw on massive mark-ups in the order of tens of thousands percent, but now they’re facing a cap of 90c/MB on 1 July this year.

The data-roaming cap will graduate downwards over the next couple of years, reaching 50c/MB in 2014. The maximum charges for voice and text message will also fall, although retail price caps have been in place for those services for a few years now.

Long-term changes

But the caps aren’t the end of the story by any means. Looking for a long-term solution, the EC made sure the new regulations will also see operators forced to decouple their roaming packages from their domestic packages.

The problem is that people hardly ever select their domestic mobile contract provider on the basis of how much that operator charges when they leave the country. So, as of two years from now, consumers will be able to select competing packages from a host of carriers when they’re planning a trip.

Of course, the measures pushed through by Kroes will only affect those travelling within the EU. Internationally, the scene is still pretty bleak. It’s not unusual to see charges of $15 per megabyte, and there’s no global regulator to force a change.

For Europeans travelling outside the EU, the new regulation does at least bring in a default €50 cap on roaming bills — customers can of course opt to go past that limit, but the general idea is to stop people from getting so-called ‘bill shock’ when they get home.

The benefits of lower data-roaming charges are clear. The EC estimates savings of more than €1,000 a year for business travelers, and €200 a year for families going on their annual vacation.

But, on the supply side, the operators’ loss is the app provider’s gain. The cheaper it is to surf the web on your tablet and smartphone while you’re abroad, the more likely you are to do it.

The same goes for apps – all those location-based services out there that currently see most of their use on the domestic level will now experience much greater takeup by those who most need to use them. It may actually become viable to catch a show over a cellular connection while abroad.

Whatever your view on regulation, it’s hard to spin Thursday’s vote as bad news for consumers, the EU as a whole, or the rapidly growing app and content businesses. Not that that will stop the operators trying.

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Seamless Wi-Fi on your smartphone could quickly become reality

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:46:04 +0000

Soon our smartphones will automatically connect to carriers’ Wi-Fi hotspots thanks to the Wi-Fi Alliance’s new Passpoint certification. Although the Wi-Fi Alliance won’t accept its first devices for certification until late June, there may not be much of a lag time before it hits consumer phones — and other devices.

Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said the Alliance isn’t expecting vendors to submit just new smartphones, tablets and access points to its labs for Passpoint certification, but also the huge body of existing devices and equipment already in the market – upgraded with new Hotspot 2.0 software. Once that old gear receives certification, vendors can push that software out to millions of access points and Wi-Fi enabled handsets.

That means unlike the usual wireless network cycles, we won’t have to wait for next-generation equipment and new gadgets to gradually make their way into the market. “There are millions of access points out there,” Davis-Felner said. “Hopefully they upgrade sooner rather than later.”

The Alliance has already pre-certified a core set of access points and handsets that will serve as a testbed against which the Alliance will compare submissions. The handsets that emerge from the Alliance’s labs will be able to seamlessly authenticate to Passpoint-compliant hotspots without futzing about with network IDs and passwords.

Don’t expect your phone to start automatically logging into every access point in sight though. Essentially Passpoint and Hotspot 2.0 will make it easy to log in to carrier-owned and-managed access points, and right now there aren’t a heck of a lot of them. AT&T has been the most aggressive deploying its own hotspots, but most of the other U.S. operators only use them for spot coverage.

But Davis-Felner said Passpoint certification may well provide the extra push for U.S. operators to get more aggressive about Wi-Fi. The big thing holding back large-scale carrier Wi-Fi adoption is the login issue. Once Hotspot 2.0 solves that problem, they will have the incentive to expand their own Wi-Fi networks and sign deals hotspot providers like Boingo or Time Warner Cable.

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