Tired of racking up huge international roaming costs for data? A local company, execMobile, has come up with a possible solution, though it’s still not exactly cheap.
ExecMobile is offering business travellers an uncapped mobile data solution that they can use in 110 countries worldwide. Although it costs R349/day, it could save travellers from unexpected “bill shock”, says founder Craig Lowe.
Lowe says execMobile’s “Unlimited” plan is a subscription product costing R99/month and includes a modem that connects to the mobile network and that creates a Wi-Fi hotspot to which up to five users can connect at a time.
A daily data cost of R349 applies when the subscriber travels outside the country — not cheap, but certainly preferable to a bill running into tens or even hundreds of thousands of rand, which is something that has happened to a number of South African travellers.
The daily roaming data charge is activated automatically when subscribers travel to one of the supported countries and start consuming data. Countries covered include 14 in Africa, including Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Congo-Kinshasa.
The company has also begun offering a product called “Global”, also a post-paid option, where travellers pay R7,99/MB to connect to the Internet. No subscription fee applies to this product. It allows companies to set daily or monthly data usage limits on their employees.
“On Unlimited, travellers will pass the Global pay-per-megabyte threshold at 38MB,” Lowe says. “As with uncapped on local data, Unlimited changes the usage patterns when people don’t have to worry about how much data they are using.”
Though many international travellers choose to buy a local Sim card when they land at their destinations, Lowe says this is often an inconvenience because often that Sim has to be registered through a Rica-type process and they often have to modify the settings on their phones.
Relying on public Wi-Fi hotspots is also problematic, he says, because they are often congested and are potentially insecure, which is a concern for companies worried about losing confidential information. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
