When somebody from our team boards a plane or a long-distance train, he or she will on most occasions debark with a smartphone that is no longer so smart. Well, to be sure these Motorolas, HTCs and so on are still very nice phones without an online data connection… but they are quite dumb.
Those of you who are based in Europe’s smaller countries and routinely travel beyond your national borders for your business (and yeah, also for your holidays) will need no explanation. For the benefit of those of you who are from the United States, India, Russia, or China here is what I am talking about: In Europe we have many small countries, several of which have a population less than what lives and works in a good-sized Asian or American city. Each of these petty countries has its mobile phone service providers which strictly cover their respective national territory only. If you travel abroad in what styles itself the European Union, you can still use your mobile phone but you pay roaming fees.
For voice connections these charges have come down nicely during the past few years but for data roaming they are still prohibitive for small and self-financed enterprises. For instance, A1 mobilkom (Austria’s largest provider) will charge you 19 Euros for 20 megabytes per month, or EUR 15 for 30 megs per day. Oh well, you know how far you get with this if you use a smartphone as it is intended to… But wait a moment, you can also buy 300 megabytes per month at a discount — that’s an extra EUR 99 on your phone bill, thank you very much. (Americans, multiply this by 1.4 to get the dollar amounts.)
Dear European Union, here is a prediction for you, straight and simple. If you don’t get national mobile phone services to reduce data roaming charges massively — or better even, to establish a few competing EU-wide services that offer affordable flat-fee services everywhere — then you can all but forget about your programs that are supposed to boost EU-internal mobility for small service businesses. These will always be at a disadvantage against their U.S., Indian or Chinese competitors if data roaming charges stay as they are today, for the simple reason that these other guys can serenely use their mobile services at domestic charges as they serve their customers in big swathes of their respective home countries. And so I say, down with EU data roaming charges… and start now.