Telenor to launch cheap data roaming packages

Telenor, the majority shareholder of the country's leading mobile operator Grameenphone, yesterday announced its plan to introduce roaming services at an affordable rate, in a bid to eliminate high and unpredictable costs using mobile services while abroad.

"It's about time we really do an effort on making roaming attractive for our customers. Roaming is the essence of what mobile communication is all about, being mobile," Jon Fredrik Baksaas, chief executive officer of Telenor, said.

"We want to encourage our customers to use data services wherever they are when on international travel. There shouldn't be any reason for Telenor subscribers not to use mobile data services when they are abroad."

The objective of introducing the retail roaming services is to increase data roaming usage to 80 percent over the next two years, he said at a briefing on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress, the biggest annual gathering of the mobile industry, in Barcelona.

Telenor, which has more than 186 million customers worldwide, has already launched the roaming service for its customers in Sweden in January, with Norwegian customers next in line at some point in the second quarter, according to Baksaas.

At present, Swedish customers can buy a 100MB data package per day that covers all of Europe for 3.1 euros.

For instance, a customer travelling to Barcelona from Sweden for a week can get 700MB for 21.7 euros, which is way less than the 139 euros he/she would have incurred for the same amount of data with the price cap of 0.20 euro/MB as regulated by the European Union.

The Telenor CEO said the service will be launched based on three pillars: affordability, cost control and simplicity. "The cost will be affordable and one will not need to switch the data roaming services off."