Smart Offers Flat Rate for Roaming Mobile Internet Service

April 28th, 2008 by Ellis | Filed under Technology/Gadget.

Smart postpaid roamers can now enjoy unlimited use of roaming mobile Internet service, all for a flat rate of just US$10 a day.

The pay-per-day roaming GPRS flat rate is made possible under a strategic agreement among member-operators of the Conexus Mobile Alliance, one of the largest mobile alliances in Asia with a combined customer base of around 170 million mobile subscribers.

Smart Communications, Inc. (SMART) is one of seven member-operators of the Conexus Mobile Alliance that are involved in the innovative mobile date roaming tariff plan. The others are Far EasTone Telecommunications Co., Ltd. In Taiwan, Hutchison Telecommunications (Hong Kong) Limited in Hong Kong, KT Freetel Co., Ltd. South Korea, NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan and StarHub Ltd., in Singapore.

Once in these Asian countries, SMART postpaid roamers simply have to log on to the network of participating Conexus Mobile Alliance members to automatically enjoy the flat rate of US$10 per day. The rate automatically applies for daily data usage of more than two megabytes.

To ensure that they stay logged on to Conexus members when they are roaming, SMART subscribers must access network settings on their mobile phone and manually select Conexus member network. The pay-per-day flat rate data roaming mobile tariff plan is a more customer-friendly way of data charging and no longer gives our customers a ‘bill shock’ at the end of the month.

For a typical HSDPA session, the consumption of mobile data can be in the tens of megabytes, so the conventional way of charging per kilobyte usage can be very costly, especially for postpaid roamers who fail to keep track of how much peso-value service has been consumed. The unlimited-per-day roaming mobile internet rate gives Smart subscribers assurance that they will be charged only US$10 for the day, no matter how many kilobytes they consume.

As a member of the Alliance, SMART also extends to its subscribers the privileges of SIM Card Replacement and Travelling Connect. With Service Centers for SIM Card Replacement set up in members’ countries and cities, corporate users with company-registered mobile lines of alliance members will be able to get a new and activated SIM card if they lose their original ones in member’s place.

Conexus Mobile Alliance has also established partnership with Travelling Connect, a leading global provider of loyalty management service to the telecommunications industry. Mobile subscribers from participating member operators can earn mile of points when traveling abroad and making mobile phone calls on members’ network to gain awards from airlines and hotels which are partner companies of Travelling Connect.

Smart is the first and only telco in the Philippines that can offer an ‘all-you-can-use-per-day’ roaming mobile Internet service. This offering allows its postpaid roamers to surf the Internet, check their emails and transmit data without worrying about counting data usage as they would on a per kilobyte or volume-based charging scheme.