Roaming outside the EU is a rip-off

Specialist International mobile operator, Awayhone, has complied a Top Six rip-off countries for mobile users to watch out for. The list includes Turkey, Russia, Morocco, China, Hong Kong and Thailand.

Turkey is a good instance of a destination where mobile phone users might trip up. You might need to make a ten call to a local landline from your mobile phone, for instance.

You might be asking the hotel what's happened to your courtesy bus from the airport. That will normally cost more than £14. Using a service like Awayphone would drop the cost down to £2.65 - which still isn't that cheap.

Out of the other countries, leading the pack is Hong Kong where phoning home using your mobile phone can cost as much as £18 for ten minutes. Awayphone reckons to slash the cost of the same call by around 70 per cent.

Naturally, Awayphone isn't the only company to be able to supply special SIM cards for roaming. On its web site, the company has performed a very useful service by naming its competitors.

See here

It's worth noting that the new so-called 'Eurotariff' that sets price caps on the cost of roaming calls might not come into force until August 2007.

Plus there is a three month transitional phase during which subscribers have to actively ask for the Eurotariff to be enable on their account.

With Eurotariff, however, it will cost €4.90 or £3.30 to make that ten minute call anywhere in Europe so it may be worth using a service like Awayphone anyway if you are a frequent business traveller.

Plus there are no Eurotariffs for roaming with text messages or roaming on data services. So EU data roaming can still prove expensive. µ

L'INQ
Awayphone