"Relax when you're on holiday with 3" -- not flipping likely!

Another newsletter in from Three this morning.

I commend the team on their communications strategy out to the masses — you see, often, operators are (righty) accused of being rather vague on their pricing strategies, especially when roaming is concerned (See Vodafone’s inexplicably complicated text).

Not Three though.

No, they’ve been entirely clear with their customers.

The only problem? It’s likely to ensure that the overwhelming majority switch their phones off at the airport.

– It will cost you 36.6p a minute to call home
– You will be charged 11.5p a minute if someone calls you
– While it is free for you to receive texts when abroad, it costs 10.2p to send them
– Data charges start at £1.28 per MB – that’s the equivalent of browsing 100 web pages

You’ll also get a free text alert for every £2.50 you spend on data. So if you’re uploading a few pictures to Facebook, expect to get about 10 text messages in a row.

It seems Three still hasn’t quite got the message on roaming. Whilst every other operator is deploying some kind of £2 or £3 for 25-ish megabytes per day, Three is holding fast to it’s policies.

Clearly, the Three roaming manager got a really, really bad deal the last time they sat down with the big european players.

My advice is pretty simple. Do a deal with the Abroadband team who charge €0.59 (£0.52) per megabyte across Europe. Indeed, Three, why don’t you re-sell access to Abroadband? Stick on 10 cents per megabyte margin for doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and you know what, the cost will still be HALF the flipping price you are charging your customers.

Being open is one thing. Charging stupid prices is another.

At the MACH Insights Forum in Berlin a few months ago I was astonished when their CEO, Morten Brøgger, pointed out that operators’ own figures reveal a massive FORTY PERCENT of subscribers do not ever, EVER roam. To be clear, 40% of subscribers going abroad actually switch their phone off. So they don’t incur any bill shock.

This, unfortunately, is a really, really good policy if you’re a Three customer.

The £1.28 per meg fee is only for Europe. All bets are off once you fly west. America, for example, is a whopping £3 per megabyte. For some inane reason, so is Hong Kong. You know, Hong Kong? Hutchison Whampoa owns half of Hong Kong yet Three UK, it’s little British subsidiary is still knocking out megabytes to customers for £3 a meg.

Here’s the full text of the newsletter:

Dear Ewan,

We want you to feel in control when using your phone abroad.
Everyone knows that it costs more to use your phone on holiday. We’d like to keep you informed about our charges so that you feel confident and relaxed.

You’ll get a free text alert for every £2.50 you spend on data. To make sure you’re protected from big bills we’ve added a data roaming price cap of £43, so that you can enjoy using your phone whilst in the EU, confident that you won’t be facing unexpected charges when you get home.

With our clear roaming charges, you’ll know exactly what everything will cost before you go – no unwelcome surprises.

– It will cost you 36.6p a minute to call home
– You will be charged 11.5p a minute if someone calls you
– While it is free for you to receive texts when abroad, it costs 10.2p to send them
– Data charges start at £1.28 per MB – that’s the equivalent of browsing 100 web pages

If you’re using an iPhone, Android or Windows phone, your data roaming is automatically turned off when you leave the country. To find out how to switch it back on (and information on data roaming settings for all our other devices), visit Three.co.uk/dataroaming

So whether you want to find a restaurant, browse local attractions or simply check up on your flight home, it’s now easy, safe and manageable.

Have a great holiday.

Thanks,
The Three Team

And just a final note. 100 web pages = 1 megabyte? Where? When?

If you happen to use your iPhone to view this page (the Pay Monthly deals page) on Three.co.uk, you’ll use up 1.12 megabytes. So that’s a quid.

Click into the iPhone 4 product information page and that’s almost 400kb. Click on ‘Buy now’ and you’ve done another 400kb.

Perhaps Three.co.uk is free to browse when you’re abroad. I couldn’t find any information about that. Anyway, you get my point..

By the way, the reason Three cancelled the ‘3LikeHome’ roaming on their own networks abroad? Reader WeirdShanghai comments:

3 HK used to allow roaming from 3UK but cancelled it after loosing far to much money between exec units. Stupid but true.