The Telenor Group has recently announced a company-wide roaming initiative to attract data-hungry consumers using mobile services while abroad with the aim to increase data roaming usage to 80% in its European markets over the next two years. Telenor said that currently, only 30 percent of Telenor’s European data usage customers are using data roaming when travelling abroad.
In many parts of the world, it is a common practice for customers travelling abroad to simply switch off data roaming as a result of high and varying data roaming retail rates, as well as unpredictable bills. (read more: USD90 Billion and Silent Roamers: Why it Matters if Subscribers Are a Little Too Quiet When They are Away?). Almost half of European Union citizens would never use mobile data abroad, according to European Commission figures. Some 90 per cent of them limit their use to basic services such as e-mails, whereas more than 25 per cent prefer to switch off their smartphones when abroad.
Within the Telenor Group, Telenor Sweden has become the first to launch a new data roaming package, unveiled in January this year, offering Swedish consumers a SEK 29 (EUR 3.1) 100 MB data package per day covering all of Europe. This means that a Swedish customer travelling to Barcelona for one week (for Mobile World Congress?) will get 700 MB for approximately SEK 200, which compares with approximately 1300 SEK with the price cap of 0,20 Euro/MB as regulated by the EU. Telenor Norway is expected to be the next company within the Group to introduce new data roaming packages, scheduled in the coming quarter.
We want to encourage our customers to use data services wherever they are when on international travels. There shouldn’t be any reason for Telenor subscribers not to use mobile data services also when they are abroad. The move from voice to data is on and we need to deliver affordable, simple and predictable data services to our customers when travelling.
