Knowing some pain is coming does not always reduce the impact when it comes, ask anyone growing up in the pre-health and safety school playground of the 1980’s were entertainment revolved around activities any marauding Viking would be proud of. The sense of impending doom coming whenever the break-time bell rang is most likely the way European operators had been feeling in the run up to the May 10th meeting to agree the final details of Roaming III. However there are strategies one can use to reduce pain for particular ailments and the current analgesic for regualtory price capping is bundling.

Telefónica has announced a new pan-European data roaming tariff for customers, which it claims is up to ten times cheaper than the new price caps approved by the European Parliament this week.

Customers on the Movistar and O2 networks will be able to use up to 25MB of data whilst abroad, anywhere across the 27 European Union member states, for just €2 per day.

The thought of Apple becoming an MVNO and offering its customers IP voice and messaging services as a cheap alternative to conventional voice and SMS is one that keeps many mobile operator CEOs awake at night. It is not just the loss of voice and SMS revenues that alarms operators. It is the risk that the operator would lose so much of its retail business. Network operators would become invisible to many of their (previous) customers.

The opportunity for roaming in Africa is tied to the available audience which is limited by factors that include the available audience for such services based on national expenditures and the GDP PPP of would-be roamers and travel patterns in the region. On the positive-side Africa’s roamers are biased toward enterprise users who generally have higher expendable incomes and greater resistance to price fluctuations (price inelastic).

The GSMA has announced a collaboration with the Wireless Broadband Alliance aimed at simplifying the process by which mobile devices connect to wifi networks. The joint initiative will see the SIM adopted as the principal means by which managed wifi networks identify mobile devices, paving the way for cross-network roaming agreements.

Singaporean operator StarHub has signed a deal with Vodafone, which will see its customers use mobile data services at more attractive rates when roaming to major European countries, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. With the new preferred rates, customers pay $25 for the first 20Mb of international data used on any particular day. Beyond this usage within the same day, roaming data access costs $3/Mb.

Data traffic demand is growing rapidly in the wake of operator strategies to encourage mobile broadband adoption. As a result, the industry is talking about offload as a solution but one which takes many forms, leaving many operators unsure of which path to take. The business case for Wi-Fi is evolving, and not just for data offload but also voice and messaging, offering an opportunity for the deeper integration of Wi-Fi with the operator’s service portfolio. However, what are the issues and friction points that operators might envisage, and how might they be overcome?