African Mobile Roaming Charges - One Of The Last Forms Of Legal Daylight Robbery

by David Ajao
2006-04-10 00:00:00 | Viewed 2736 times

The title of this article is the same title of the lead story of Balancing Act, this week. I choose the same title because I want to share my opinion about the subject.

I have had the experience of prepaid roaming on a GSM network when I used Areeba Ghana's prepaid roaming service in 2004. By the way, Areeba, then known as Spacefon, pioneered prepaid roaming in the west African sub-region. Signing-up for the service cost me the cedi equivalent of $30 and I had to purchase call credit worth $40. I have always maintained my opinion that the charges by the GSM operators for roaming is rather exorbitant.

Areeba Ghana's roaming service
While roaming on Areeba, I had to pay $1 per minute for making calls and $0.50 per minute for receiving calls! Forwarding calls whilst roaming on Areeba cost $2 each time the call forwarding is activated, an one does not receive text messages on the number to which calls are forwarded. Areeba's Pay Monthly (post-paid) roaming service is even more bizarre. A subscriber has to deposit a massive $1,500 before being able to roam with his/her mobile phone number!

I recently had a debate with a staff of Areeba, about this very issue and she tried to make her point based on the fact that the $1,500 is justifiable. Why? Some unscrupulous individuals had in the past ran-up a high bill on Areeba's post-paid roaming service and then disappeared into thin air. Well, I also made my point to her, a subscriber should be allowed to deposit the amount of money he/she wants to, and simply cut the subscriber off, after the deposit has been exhausted. $1,500 is capital for business. Leaving it with a cellco is simply out, for me.

It has always been because of the high deposit on Areeba's post-paid roaming that I have kept away from their Pay-Monthly package. One can only hope that they would do something about this.

Elsewhere in Europe, the European Commission has been actively working on reducing the charges associated with roaming, to the barest minimum. Balancing Act opened its article with the sentence:

"Last week the European Commission announced that it will force mobile companies to lower their excessively high international roaming charges and scrap all roaming charges for receiving calls abroad."

Three solutions were opined in the article:

• Regulation-driven: Arab regulators could use price controls to set an inter-Arab IOT rate.
• Competition-driven: Through creating Volume-Rate trade-off deals using the OTA technology.
• Fairness-driven: Enabling the Optimized Routing and billing users accordingly

Balancing Act's concluding lines:

"Unfortunately this is not an issue on which Sub-Saharan regulators and policy-makers have covered themselves in glory. We all smirk knowingly when we buy local SIM cards to avoid roaming charges when visiting countries in Africa but this surely cannot be a sensible way to organize things. (Any more than having 2-3 mobile phones because interconnect prices have not been properly sorted out.) Some mobile operators are now offering both pre- and post-paid roaming but rates remain high so take-up does not yet show any sign of displacing the “buy-a-local SIM” workaround.

For seekers after the holy grail, there is the African Telecommunications Union project to develop a single SIM-card usable “usable right across the African continent”. Announced in February 2005 and costing US$800,000, this study was meant to be delivered in 12 months but no outcomes have yet been announced. Indeed the ATU went to the recent ITU Doha meeting with a document calling for further studies on the subject.

A simpler approach would surely be for the regulators’ associations of the continent to approach the EU and work with it on reducing roaming rates between Europe and Africa. Also following the excellent example set by the Arab Regulators Network and Egypt’s NTRA, a country regulator in a key region like Southern Africa could take on the task of compiling some data. With information available in the clear light of day, it would then be possible to start the discussion about dismantling this example of legal daylight robbery."

I would conclude by saying: "If not now, then when?"

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