GPRS roaming still needs to break free
GPRS roaming still has a future despite a slow rollout, initial customer dissatisfaction and 3G on the horizon, believes Jesper Holm Schlichtkrull, roaming manager of TDC Mobil in Denmark.
On top of that, he said there had been problems testing GPRS roaming because it worked differently on different manufacturers' handsets.
"This means the settings and usage can be difficult for the customer to understand," he said. "Customers also don't know which operator in a country provides GPRS roaming, can end up trying on the wrong network and then give up and abandon GPRS roaming."
He said that although GPRS roaming accounted for less than 1% of GSM subscribers, there was a future for it.
"But the rollout is slow," he said, "and it will be even slower if we do not provide the right applications and make them easy to use. We need to kick-start the GPRS services such as MMS to make customers aware of them."
He also said the pricing models had to be kept simple.
John Hoffman, consulting director with the GSM Association in the USA, said there was a danger of some smaller operators being left behind with GPRS roaming. "It is the small independent operators that don't have many GPRS networks up and running that don't have the roaming agreements," he said. "It is fine for the large global organisations such as Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile."
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