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Roaming when roaming

Using cloud services while roaming can be costly.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

I'm in London preparing for Tier1 Research's Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit that my colleagues at Tier1 Research (Note: Yes, Tier1 Research is a business unit of The 451 Group) are presenting on June 15th.

While here, I've been having a devil of a time trying to tame my HTC HD2 so it won't reach out over the cellular network while I'm not looking rather than using the hotel's WiFi to grab my email, get weather updates, or allow me to read web-based news.

So far, I have found six different places so far to tell the device don't access a specific resource while I'm roaming including:

  • once for each email account (3)
  • once for the weather function
  • once for the location service
  • once for the stocks application

Windows Mobile 6.5

Although I like the hardware HTC has designed and the fact that HTC has gone to great lengths to hide Windows Mobile 6.5, users must still wrestle with the operating system for many low-level functions.

As soon as someone gets down to that level, it becomes very clear that Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5 is rather clunky and is not very "finger friendly." That is, many functions take quite a number of steps, the steps are distributed among a number of different utilities and adjusting the settings requires a deft hand and tiny fingers.

It would have been nice if the Microsoft software engineers would have centralized roaming settings rather than hiding them deep within each individual function.

Why do I need to go to such lengths?

Point number one is that T-Mobile's roaming costs are ridiculously high ($15/MB). They don't offer pricing packages that set a specific price for 20 MB, 200 MB, etc. as does AT&T. So, international travel is likely to produce a big headache when the monthly bill arrives.

Point number two is that I was informed prior to my international trip that my employer would rather that I use the free WiFi provided by the hotel (the interesting Bermondsy Square Hotel) rather than my cellular provider's costly roaming data service.  In other words, they won't pay for international data charges that I accidentally incur.

Point number three is that although I thought I had set everything properly, I keep finding network-centric functions of the HD2 that I've never used are set by default to use the network whether I'm roaming or not.

Do you suppose Microsoft would pay my roaming charges if I sent them the bill? No? Well, it was a pleasant dream while it lasted.

Time delay on usage data

I have no idea how much data has been transferred by my handheld device at this point so I can't calculate how close my monthly bill is going to be to the U.S. national debt. This information doesn't show up on T-Mobile's my.t-mobile.com website yet. I guess I'll get the bad news later.

Note: I was finally able to chat with a T-Mobile representative, Jeffrey_B, to find out what charges I could expect on my monthly bill. No data charges have appeared as of this moment.

Something to consider

Since handset suppliers are increasingly loading up their devices with network-centric functions and some of them could clearly be labeled as software as a service (cloud computing) functions, the cost of roaming is an important consideration for mobile business people when they select a device. As an aside, I found it far easier to control this when I was traveling with an iPhone in my pocket.

Mobile service suppliers clearly need to make this simple and affordable if they expect business travelers to wholeheartedly adopt mobile software as a service applications.

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