Canadians travelling to the U.S. who want to avoid roaming shock can now buy Roam Mobility packs from 7-Elevens.
Roam Mobility, the Vancouver company born from Canada's astronomical roaming rates, is now available in 500 7-Eleven locations across Canada. It is also available in London Drugs and other outlets, including duty-free shops at border crossings.
Roam Mobility has an agreement with T-Mobile in the U.S. that allowed it to create a special network just for Canadians travelling in the U.S.
For $20, Canadians can buy a Roam Mobility SIM card (which requires an unlocked phone) and purchase unlimited talk, text and data packs for as little as $4 for day – about $28 for a full week.
By contrast, Michael Geist, a Canadian academic who specializes in telecom and Internet issues, recently blogged that a family of four travelling in the U.S. for a long weekend could spend about $446 on roaming: $87 per day for talk time, $31.96 to check emails, and $30 for 40 texts.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) plans to force Canadian telecoms to cap their roaming charges to prevent roaming shock. Telecoms will be ordered to enforce caps that would prevent a customer from being billed more than $100 in roaming, in what Geist says "may be the start of a long-overdue effort to reign in Canadian roaming fees that the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has reported are amongst the highest in the world."
Roam Mobility founder Emir Aboulhosn isn't worried, however, that Canadian telecoms will eventually be able to compete with his company. The deal it has with T-Mobile isn't a roaming agreement – it's a special mobile phone service just for Canadians travelling in the U.S.
"Right now the standard going rate for roaming data without a package is $3 a megabyte," Aboulhosn told Business in Vancouver. "If you buy a talk and text package with us, we sell you data at $0.01 a megabyte.
"If they made them slash their pricing by 50%, they're still going to be 100 times more expensive than me," Aboulhosn said.
