Ive often wondered how Telstra can afford to maintain their inefficient retail outlets. Because seriously, Telstra stores are in the best and most expensive locations, but very rarely do any customers actually enter them.
Working in Telstra retail must be the best job in the world. Nothing to do. I once counted 10 employees in a store and one customer. And I'm sure the guy was lost.
So how do they do it? One way is their price gouging on global roaming for mobile phones. In this case, data roaming. Sure, they aren't the most expensive of the Australian telcos - Optus takes that title for post paid service.
But Telstra isn't cheap either. And given the massive coverage they have in the corporate sector and those who travel for business, its easy to see that 3G data roaming is a huge cash cow for Telstra. So that's how they do it!
The rates of Telstra Global roaming for 3G data are .015 cents per kilobyte. That's $15 per megabyte or $15,000 per gigabyte. Yes, that's thousands of dollars.
We'll leave it to Telstra to explain:
"3G data services used while roaming overseas is charged at $0.015 per kB for all data used including upload and download with a $0.50 flag fall for each data session initiated by your service. Video telephony and 3G data are available to a growing list of countries. You can also continue to use your Telstra 3G service with over 300 roaming partners in over 170 countries for voice and SMS."
One wonders if that 50 cent flagfall kicks in every time your service drops out then reconnects. Or every time someone sends you an email. Either way, at $15,000 for every gigabyte, who gives a toss about a lazy 50 cents flagfall?
Don't think that you can shop elsewhere for a roaming data service either. Optus charges over $20,000 per gigabyte. Vodafone is a cool $10,000 - or $50,000 per gigabyte equivalent if you are on a pre paid service.
The solution? Turn off your data or buy a local sim card with data pack when you reach your destination. Don't get stung. I'm sure some people have come back to bills in the thousands of dollars.
About Just Grumpy
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Try $11 per voice minute roaming onto a couple of Russian networks with a Telstra SIM. And then miss a call, see it go to voicemail and be paying around $25 per minute just for the message.
Overseas SIM is fine except
1. sometimes hard to find data-enabled
2. call rates also not good, especially international (which is where you'll mostly be calling)
3. You have to tell your 100 closest friends the new number, and get them to change their address books (not easy)
4. credit wastage means maybe you're effectively paying maybe double for the usage
5. hard to top-up (try it in say Indonesia when very few vendors speak English)
6. if you try and claim it as a business expense your accounts people may refuse it as unsupported by tax invoice
7. no way will you get a post-paid SIM, unless you've lived there before (and therefore have a credit history)
8. you may not be able to get a local prepaid SIM at all - countries are increasingly blocking the sale (or activation) of these except with (local) identification - which you probably won't have
9. some countries (China...) may let you buy a starter pack, but not top-up without official (local...) ID. So it's back to buy another starter pack, and letting your 100 closest friends know the number...
For voice services, you could try www.vroam.com (disclaimer, I used to work there)
I think you will find that a large portion of the roaming charges are passed back to our local telco's from the international telco's that we roam to. I have no doubt that Telstra, Optus, et al are adding their own profit margin to it, but it isn't all margin for them.
You mean that an overseas carrier are charging Telstra $10000 per gig and they are then passing on the charge of $15000 per gig to the customer? LOL
If the overseas data providers were charging any more than a couple of hundred bucks for 1 gig of data id be very surprised. Data isnt that expensive. This is a huge markup for telstra and the other carriers. Long been known that this is how they make their real money.
Telstra also offer international data browsing packs. For $29 per month you get 10MB worth of international data or $160 for 60MB The telstra website only promotes these packs for pre paid customers, but if you dig deep through the international roaming terms and conditions, you will find that they are also available for post-paid customers. It's still expensive, but at least it is only about $3 per MB instead of $15, it's not a bad price when you think that their pay as you go rate in australia is $2 per MB. However if you exceed your allowance, they will bump you back to the $15 per MB, and it is only available for a select number of countries.
Has anyone got a solution to fight these charges?
get rid of your friends and family before you go haha
Try www.roamingsim.com.au
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