TC's Communications

Asher Moses, the technology editor for the Sydney Morning Herald (and associated Aussie newspapers), has written an article about how Australia is the third most expensive country in the world for international data roaming.

Australians are being slugged global roaming rates of up to $20 per megabyte. Aussie travellers [pay] an average of just under $US12 per MB.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) said global roaming excess data usage charges were just the latest in a long line of bill shock suffered by Australian telco customers.

Perhaps Australian telco customers won’t be surprised by that.

What might be surprising to those unfamiliar with advances in satellite technology is that the cost of operating mobile satcom terminals is in the neighbourhood of – and sometimes lower than – the mobile costs above.

A BGAN terminal can provide broadband speeds anywhere in the world for less than $10AUD/MB of data transfer.

Even an IsatPhone Pro, tethered to use as a data modem with appropriate compression and acceleration like XGate, can cost under $12AUD/MB transferred. Sure, it’s circuit-switched, and you wouldn’t use it to browse all day. But it demonstrates capability and cost that are not worlds away from what Australian customers roaming internationally are experiencing now.

And when you consider that the IsatPhone Pro can make voice calls from just about anywhere in the world for less than a dollar a minute – almost certainly cheaper than international voice roaming rates – it starts looking pretty impressive indeed.

IsatPhone Pro. Image from indigoprime on flickr via Creative Commons license.

• BGAN
• IsatPhone Pro
• XGate