If you travel overseas and use your mobile for picking up your email or web browsing I’m sure you’ll know just how expensive data roaming charges can be. Taking Orange for example, data roaming can cost up to £8 per MB – to put that in to context, receiving an email with a 1MB attachment would cost you £8! There are travel bundles that you can pre-purchase to reduce the cost of you roaming charges and these typically reduce the per-MB rate down to about £2.50.
However, £2.50 is still ridiculously expensive in my opinion, and just a little bit of casual browsing and email activity can easily run up huge bills.
Vodafone have gone a step further as you’ll see from their press release below. Vodafone Passport gives customers up to 25MB for just under £5 per day, around 20p per MB. While this is definitely a step in the right direction I wonder if 25MB is really enough?
VODAFONE UK CUSTOMERS TO GET EVEN BETTER VALUE WHEN USING THE INTERNET OVERSEAS
- 2.5 million Vodafone UK customers benefitting from great value summer calls, text and picture messaging roaming with Vodafone Passport
- From 1 July, customers can browse the web, check their inbox and send emails for less than £5 a day while overseas
- Only UK network with per day data roaming charges
- from £4.99 per day on a mobile for up to 25MB across Europe – the equivalent of 20p per MB
- £9.99 for 50MB on a laptop across Europe
Travellers are now set to get even better value and greater clarity on costs when accessing the internet around the world from their mobile phones or laptops from Vodafone UK.
From July 1, business and consumer customers, across Europe, can access the internet from their mobile phone for just £4.99 per day for up to 25MB. Those who choose to only read a couple of emails, or quickly check Facebook for example, and keep their usage below 1 MB, will be charged on a per kb rate. Receiving and replying to a short email will use around 100KB, which would cost just 50p.
Once a customer reaches 1MB the cost will be £4.99, but the next 24MB are free. This would be enough data to browse approximately 250 internet pages, read and reply to 25 emails, find your way to a restaurant on Google Maps, read eight news stories on the BBC website, change your status on Facebook and watch three 90 second videos on YouTube. Any further internet usage will be charged at £4.99 for each 25 MB.
This greater clarity and value has also been introduced for laptop users who want to use the internet when they are abroad. Customers with their laptops in Europe will receive 50MB for £9.99.
For the purposes of roaming, a day is classified as midnight to midnight UK time so customers need to be aware of their time zone. Outside Europe, customers will be charged £14.99 for each 25MB when accessing the internet via their mobile and £29.99 for 50MB through a laptop.
Vodafone is currently the only UK operator to offer per day data roaming charging which when broken down equates to just 20p per MB in Europe. Later in the summer, customers will receive real time alerts as they approach the end of their data allowance.
On June 1, Vodafone UK abolished roaming charges for Vodafone Passport customers in 35 countries across Europe. Until August 31, Vodafone Passport customers can call, text and send picture messages from overseas for the same prices as they would at home.
For further information on data roaming visit vodafone.co.uk/data roaming. Information about Vodafone Passport and the summer roaming promotion can be found at vodafone.co.uk/roaming
Posted by: Matt
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