Voda pitches flat rate data roaming

Vodafone on Wednesday announced a flat rate data roaming rate of Eur12 for a full day or 50Mb worth of use.

The tariff will be available to Vodafone customers from July 1 and follows on from the introduction of flat rate data tariffs in individual countries over the past year. Vodafone has also seen some significant success with its Vodafone Passport, voice roaming service, which now has over 12 million subscribers.

The new tariff is aimed at making data roaming charges more transparent and may be an attempt to head off any further intervention from the European Commission, which is currently taking operators to task over voice roaming rates.

The Eur12 (excluding VAT) flat rate tariff is applicable when a Vodafone customer is roaming on Vodafone subsidiary networks in Europe. Should a customer roam onto another network then standard per megabyte charging will apply.

Vodafone said it will also enter into reciprocal wholesale arrangements with any other European operators at a new lower wholesale rate for data roaming. In doing so, Vodafone is seeking to lower its own costs and increase overall activity in the data roaming market and expects this initiative to result in significantly lower data roaming costs for customers of both Vodafone and its competitors.