I have blogged about Rogers’ super high US roaming rates as well as the value offered by their new roaming bundles a few weeks back, today as we were taxiing to our gate at London’s Heathrow Airport, I received this text from Rogers.
Rogers welcomes you abroad! $2/min voice roaming rate applies. To save up to 46%, get a Travel Pack @ http://www.rogers.com/wm/euro (data fees apply)
Again, I was pretty stunned, as I have always found my European roaming to be around $1.45 a minute (what they now charge for US roaming), however not quite as surprised as I was at the $1.45/min for US roaming. Rogers pricing strategy here is becoming clear, they are trying to get a higher average revenue per user by encouraging people to sign up for a monthly roaming bundle, which would yield lower roaming rates, but only if you pick a bundle that exactly matches your roaming usage.
Roaming minutes do not roll over to be used later, thus you lose them at the end of a billing cycle, so if you use only 10 of your 30 roaming minutes in a month, you may actually pay more for your roaming bundle per minute than had you just roamed without the bundle. These dreadful pricing strategies have been designed to maximize individual customer revenue yield.
I cannot imagine we would be seeing this if their was proper competition in the GSM telephone space in Canada.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Fully agree with you. The lack of competition explains why we cannot find better deals. Same deal here as in banking and insurance : antitrust probes where are you ?..
In Canada… Where abouts are you?