Vodafone Promises Affordable Roaming Charges
In a new mobile broadband scheme for people going abroad, Vodafone has launched ‘Passport’, which would allow reasonable roaming plans for its customers. However, accessing data would continue to be on the expensive side when you are travelling.
The ‘Passport’ scheme sees Vodafone providing to its 2.5 million customers access to data services abroad through their mobile phones, at a reasonable rate of £4.99 per day for up to 25MB, which is just 20p per MB. Every additional usage of 25MB would cost another £4.99.
Vodafone says that 25MB of data would be sufficient to go through around 250 pages of the internet, send at least 25 emails, use Google Maps to track any restaurant, read eight news stories on the BBC news website, amend your profile on Facebook and view three videos of a minute and half on YouTube. Although one could argue that if someone wishes to access so much of data during his vacation, he might as well use the service to look for some place more exciting.
For users who do not want to indulge in extensive usage of data, Vodafone offers smaller packages under 1MB that would suffice to access email once in a while on vacation for which they would be charged on a per kb basis. Accessing and creating a short email reply may use up just about 100 KB. This would cost a paltry 50p.
Those who do not wish to use a mobile phone, can avail data access through their mobile laptops by using Vodafone’s packages at the rate of 50MB for £9.99 in Europe and £29.99 outside
However, it is important to remember that the billing on the new scheme starting today, would be based on UK timing, and the usage of data per day would be calculated from midnight to midnight UK time.
