Life & Work

Travelling abroad? Keep an eye on roaming charges

Bd-PriceWar

Cellphone users have found themselves having to pay dearly for not managing call rates across borders PHOTO | FILE

Communicating with your loved ones especially when travelling outside the country is important to keep you up-to-date with the goings on back home. If one is travelling  abroad with their local Sim card and using it to stay in touch, you may find yourself running crazy bills that may run into thousands of shillings especially if you are on a post-paid tariff.

Before  you travel, you need to find out from your service provider if your phone will work in a particular country as some countries may not be registered as roaming partners.

With roaming, you are charged for making calls as well as receiving them, with the costs of sending a text message and the cost of  data usage per megabyte being considerably higher than what you would be charged  within the country. This is mainly because your local network is trying to ride on a network in the other country to ensure that your phone remains operational.

Airtel has a roaming product, One Airtel, that allows customers to make calls at local rates without incurring any roaming charges across 17 countries in Africa on some designated networks.

According to Airtel Kenya chief executive Adil El Youssefi, the mobile service provider has negotiated the best rates with various operators in the commonly visited countries to ensure that their customers enjoy favourable roaming rates.

“Roaming charges are dependent on the various inter-operator tariffs and at times subscribers of the home network may be forced to pay premium rates for the service,” he says.

In the East African Community bloc, Burundi and South Sudan are the most expensive countries for one to be roaming on the Airtel network while Morocco, Ethiopia, Angola and Cameroon are the most expensive destinations across the continent. Globally, roaming on Airtel in Austria, Russia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Turkey can also be quite costly.

There are cases where, when travelling near the Kenyan borders or where one may visit areas close to the border, your phone will automatically switch to the neighbouring country’s network but El Youssefi  says that the company has installed a border roaming gateway platform that limits the cross border network latching by the subscriber until one has actually crossed to the other country.

According to Kui Kinyanjui of Safariom, PrePay customers automatically access roaming in countries where the telecom has roaming agreements with the operators, however, PostPay customers need to pay a roaming deposit to activate the service. The deposit is, however, not required when travelling within East Africa.

“Data usage usually attracts higher roaming costs than voice and those on this tariff should be aware that receiving calls while roaming is also charged and at a much higher rate than local rates. You are better off using preferential networks in most destinations in order to enjoy the lowest possible rates,” she said.

If you must have your phone on with your local network, you should minimise usage of both voice and data by turning off unnecessary applications especially emails that could be running on the device or simply disconnect the access to data networks.

Instead of using data through your network, you should use the WiFi available in the hotel where you’re staying in the visiting country or another secure public network.

Use of applications like Skype and Viber which use Voice over internet protocols can be used  as substitutes  for phone calls while an application like  WhatsApp can supplement sending texts.

If you need to move around when you get to your destination, download maps to your phone ahead of time preferably with your hotel connection to allow you to access the maps even when you are offline - or better still, ask the reception for a town map.

Even if you are on a short stay in a foreign country, always opt to buy the local Simcards and load airtime because it is the ultimate cheap way to communicate.

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