Thursday, February 07, 2008

KPN, 3 and Play drop data roaming charges. It's cheaper to use VOIP

KPN, 3 and Play have dropped the data roaming charges between their networks to 25 cents/Megabyte. That's great for their customers roaming in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Poland etc. So how many seconds of VoIP does this buy you? A VoIP stream is between 10 kilobit per second and 90Kb/s. This translates to between 90 and 800 seconds. Given that the price of a roaming call on the mobile network has been set at 49 cents per 60 seconds and receiving at 24 cents/minute, it seems that it is now officially cheaper to use VoIP for mobile roaming!

Put differently: any (VoIP like) stream of 266 Kbit/s or 133 Kbit/s is now cheaper than a GSM call of 9600 bit/s.

There must be a catch here. Telco's are never this afraid of mrs. Reding and this is not a competitive market yet!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The catch is that the operators are deliberately sabotaging this construction by doing funny stuff with those VoIP packets... The end result is that VoIP calls will sound terrible.