On Thursday, October 11, 2001, at 02:17 , Nick May wrote:
> And a more Luddite reflection: anyone who has ever tried, seriously, to
> have a holiday away from it all thanks their lucky stars that roaming is
> in its infancy.
The new roaming model I spoke about addresses this with an interesting
feature called "Selective Call Forwarding". Whenever you roam, this
activates automatically and then anybody who you haven't entered in a
list of correspondents will be diverted to voicemail (which can also be
forwarded to yourself). Where callers do not have caller ID, the system
requests a PIN number to be entered before forwarding the call otherwise
it diverts to voicemail. PIN numbers are automatically distributed to
correspondents when the user enters them into his list and expiry dates
for such PINs can also be specified.
However, I regard this more of a cost saving feature. How many people
are there who truly want to get away from it all, despite making
statements to the contrary. Most people are either overwhelmed by the
thrill of using gadgetry in whatever new way or environment and many are
getting a kick out of bragging rights. I have seen people in front of
the Sphinx in Giza taking their cellphones out and calling up their
neighbours or colleagues only to brag about where they are and how
beautiful it all is ;-)
In fact, I have been working for one of the mobile phone companies in
Egypt lately and I learned that roaming usage is particularly high at
Giza and other places where tourists go and all the market research
shows that bragging about sight seeing is a very important driver. The
Egyptians have even come up with a tourist SIM card which is valid for 2
or 3 weeks only and they sell a lot of them through street merchants in
front of the pyramids. If those tourists had planned to use their phone
they could have bought that SIM card at reception in their hotel or from
the travel agents. No, they felt an urge to call home when they saw the
pyramids and bought a local prepaid SIM card there and then to
circumvent roaming charges.
This to me is more than proof enough that roaming for tourists could be
a big hit if the cost can be brought down to a level affordable to
tourists.
rgds
benjamin
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Received on Thu Oct 11 09:12:17 2001