Why isn’t roaming available at home as well as abroad?
Like any Telecom XT Mobile customer, I’m unhappy with the recent spate of outages, but I’m sympathetic to the harassed engineers at Telecom and Alcatel-Lucent striving to find and cure the problems. Anyone who’s ever built a large new system dreads a spate of apparently unrelated problems which act like pouring acid into an open wound. The shrilling and wailing of customers, competitors and often-ill-informed commentators does nothing to help. However, I’m struck by one curious feature of the New Zealand environment which should have alleviated the problem - roaming. One of the advantages of GSM-based systems is that roaming is very easy for customers and operators - it’s a built-in aspect of the technology and the business model. If I’m overseas, my phone selects a network from all those with coverage for my location (in my preset preference order), which I can easily override if I so chose. But back home, even though I can see other networks on my phone, my SIM card bars me from choosing them. That’s anti-competitive, as well as being a damned nuisance.I’m normally anti-regulation but telecommunication seems to need it. Operators naturally want to maximise revenue spent with them and not their competitors, but that should be achieved through pricing, service, quality and loyalty. Local roaming won’t diminish payment commitments under pricing plans and phone purchase agreements. If I was the regulator, I’d definitely be taking a hard look at mobile network operators barring their customers from using other networks (and while s/he’s at it, local and international roaming charges relative to own charges).
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