PICTURE this: It’s the holiday season and you’re having the time of your life in a luxurious location outside the country. You want to tweet to your friends back home and tell them about your awesome experience, so you pick up your smart phone. Suddenly, a text message alert dampens your holiday spirit. Your data usage has expired, it reads. And you simply want to fly back home, and give your service provider a piece of your mind!
With stiff competition among telecoms operators, tariffs are gradually crashing as operators continue to give incentives to woo subscribers. However, many operators are not extending this reduction in data charges to tourist, business men and women, holiday makers, government functionaries and other people who travel abroad. As result of the high charges by operators, many travellers rarely have access to the internet using their mobile phones while roaming.
To avoid these charges, therefore, they intentionally switch off their data connection, thus avoid exchanging emails, multimedia messages, surfing the Internet, chatting, uploading and downloading information. The MTN one world package helps put to rest the minds of travellers like you. With this new tariff, subscribers can browse in nineteen different countries at the same rates with which they browse at home.
While many operators are shying away from resolving the high rates of data roaming charges or coming up with a better alternative, only a few are trying to ensure that their medium and high value customers still have access to the internet through their mobile phones while roaming. One of such telecommunication operator is MTN. This is evident its recent launch of Browse like Home when you Roam with “MTN One World”.
The MTN One World is a new data roaming tariff where MTN prepaid and post-paid subscribers, who travel out of the country, have access to the internet on their mobile phones and send text messages, paying a standard home rate of 5kobo per kilobyte and N4 per SMS, as if they were in Nigeria. This service is available in any of 19 MTN operating countries namely: Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, South Africa, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Guinea Conakry, Zambia, Iran, Sudan, Guinea Bissau, Cyprus, Swaziland, Yemen, Afghanistan and Botswana.