Abroadband: Data roaming in 50 countries for €0.59/mb

While I was running around like a mad man at Mobile World Congress this week, reader Kerry Ritz spotted news that Telecom Austria has decided to break apart the mobile roaming marketplace.

Abroadband uses Telecom Austria’s existing international roaming agreements to offer PAYG data roaming across 50 countries for just €0.59 per megabyte.

And that’s it.

No strings, no nonsense. You need to stump up €19 for the sim card and there’s a yearly access fee of €10 to keep the sim active.

And then you just pay per megabyte. €0.59 per megabyte seems highly reasonable. Indeed, it’s at least half the per-megabyte price that Three UK and Vodafone charge me for EU roaming.

With Abroadband, you just top up when you need to. You get real time usage statistics from the service so you’ll never run up a crazy bill.

Telecom Austria’s existing agreements ensure that you’ll be roaming on to quality operators in the supported countries too.

You can have a normal sim card, a microsim card and you can get a USB stick if you’d like one. Me? I’m going to get a couple and see how I like it.

I’m particularly impressed that it’s the same rate in a ton of different useful countries from South Africa to the United States — and of course, Europe.

I’m going to order one. I’ll let you know how I get on.