NO more bill shock or grappling with different operator toll rates for frequent-travelling mobile Web surfers and e-mail users - that's the promise of pan-Asian telecom consortium Bridge Alliance, which last week launched a new data roaming service called Bridge DataRoam.
The new service lets subscribers roam in participating countries - 11 in all - without having to deal with different local data roaming charges. Instead, they pay only a monthly flat fee.
The service comes with two capped monthly subscription plans - US$30 for 15MB of data roaming capacity, and US$60 for 40MB.
With the price of data roaming as high as US$12 per MB in some Asian countries, the new service could slash costs by as much as 90 per cent from mobile subscribers' monthly phone bills, said Bridge Alliance CEO Mary Ong at the launch here.
Furthermore, subscribing to a flat-rate plan means that frequent travellers will not have to worry about being slugged by unexpected toll costs, she said.
To sign up, one must be a subscriber of a Bridge Alliance member operator. In Singapore, SingTel Mobile subscribers are eligible.
When roaming to another country, subscribers must be on the networks of the resident Bridge Alliance member.
The current list of operators are SingTel Mobile (Singapore), Airtel (India), AIS (Thailand), CSL (Hong Kong), CTM (Macau), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), SK Telecom (Korea), SingTel Optus (Australia), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan) and Telkomsel (Indonesia).
The maximum monthly data roaming capacity of 40MB should be ample for even very heavy mobile e-mail users, according to Lim Chuan Poh, CEO International of SingTel and Bridge Alliance chairman.
That's the equivalent of 800 e-mail messages or 4,000 Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) pages, he said. "Based on current usage rates, a very heavy BlackBerry user will useless than 5MB a month."
The service currently has no provision for incremental usage if subscribers exceed their stipulated data capacity. Once exceeded, normal local data roaming toll rates will apply.
But if customer usage profile changes in future, and as higher data capacities are demanded, the alliance will consider revising its service packages, Mr Lim said.
