Howard Oakley
If the iPad is to fully capture our imaginations as a data roaming device, there has to be some unification of the European mobile markets.
This year, our annual trek to the mountains will take us to Luchon, a spa town nestling at the end of the railway line deep in the French Pyrenees. In keeping with previous holidays, it’s a key staging point in the Tour de France, but this time we won’t be taking bicycles, aiming instead to walk and paint. You may know Luchon better from its winter alter ego of Superbagnères, eight minutes and a thousand metres up the lift.
Having spent much of last year’s holiday sitting on steps a hundred metres away from our chalet in order to get a good wireless signal, this year I made Internet connectivity a criterion for our accommodation. At first, 3G data access also seemed important until I realised how complex that would become, to the point where it helped determine which iPad I bought. Steve Jobs may be right in asserting that the iPad will supplant PCs for many, but there needs to be fundamental change in data service provision first.
Before I even considered problems peculiar to iPads, I looked at the costs of data roaming from a phone or USB dongle. Although within the UK these seemed pretty reasonable, at between 0.25p and 5p per megabyte, most providers wanted around £3 per megabyte when roaming in France, and the cheapest wouldn’t stoop below £1.50. If our hotel’s promise of free wireless Internet access proved illusory, roaming on 3G instead would cost about a hundred times greater than on this side of the Channel.
When iPad plans became available, they conformed to similar rules: the cost when roaming in France on an Orange plan remained around a hundred times that of home usage in the UK. Putting these in context, Stuart Hughes’ gold-and-diamond-encrusted iPad costing £130,000 would equate to less than 450GB of data at standard roaming charges. The only way to obtain sensible rates would be to buy a second micro Sim from Orange France and then pay between two and five cents per megabyte.
Given that Orange UK and France are both owned by France Telecom, and the last time I looked both France and the UK were member states of the EU’s single market, I can’t understand the obscene cost of roaming with a UK micro Sim in France, nor Orange UK’s failure to offer Orange France micro Sims to the many who want to use iPads in both countries. Surely, in the series of eight different treaties over the more than half a century since the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, is this not the protectionism we’re supposed to have put behind us? Or perhaps we have to buy a micro Sim in each of the EU’s 23 official languages? I pity the poor iPad owners of Luxembourg, who presumably have to travel with a fistful of micro Sims.
When mulling over this market anomaly, I recalled that the EU had recently taken action to address issues over high data charges when roaming in Europe. Providers were only too glad to inform me that, as a result of this, I could now opt to have my data costs capped at a maximum of €50 (about £41.50) a month, beyond which I would be unable to obtain any further data until the next month.
So, Mr Jobs, if your iPad can bring about unification of the mobile phone markets within the EU, that might be truly revolutionary.
