3 ms·

Ukko Mobile From Helsinki Eliminates Data Roaming

79 points by dsarle 14y ago

icebraining 14y ago
Interesting, but their site seems light on details. Under Coverage, they just have "throughout Europe", which doesn't tell much (Europe is a rather poorly-defined concept). In any case, 40+€ seems expensive unless you travel a lot.
- flexie 14y ago
  40-80 EUR is not that bad compared to many single country subscriptions in Scandinavia. Depends on whether it includes data traffic, free talk etc. If this works as advertised I believe it will be a game changer. The EU maximum roaming charges[1] have to some extend compensated for the lack of competition but this would be even better. 1: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/tariffs/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/t...
  - untog 14y ago
    It's still a lot compared to just buying a PAYG SIM card when you arrive in a country. I tend not to travel between ten different countries, I'm usually back and forth between two or three. I can swap out SIM cards when I arrive and carry on like nothing ever happened. If you get a SkypeIn number you can just remap it to a different local number whenever you change SIM cards, it works great.
  - taneliv 14y ago
    What? I pay 13€ / month for unlimited 15Mbps 3G in Finland, and kids have 5 € / month unlimited 0.5Mbps 3G. They all include some text and voice, and the coverage is spotless for daily commute and holidays. Where do you consider 40 € / month to be "not that bad" for similar connectivity? OTOH, roaming fees while traveling can easily burn through several hundreds of euros, making 40-80 € / month a good plan even if you travel only once a year (but need data while traveling). Just the downloading the maps for navigating from airport to hotel and checking your email may cost more than a hundred euros (been there, done that).
jtheory 14y ago
This sounded very cool for a minute -- I'm mostly based in France, sometimes the UK, but now I'm in Malaysia for a month, and will be in the US probably later this year for a chunk of time. ...but the title was seriously misleading (just Europe, and not even specifying which countries yet); I'm still going to have massive roaming charges if I don't switch SIMs. How hard is it to put "...eliminates European data roaming costs forever"? My current solution is multiple SkypeIn numbers -- you can call me in the US or UK, for example, and either number will forward to my current (local) mobile number, which I don't give out. The only serious flaw with this approach is SMS -- SkypeIn can't accept (and/or forward SMS), even to my Skype account.
- dsarle 14y ago
  Good point about the title. But to answer your question, as far as I know Ukko told me that they want to expand quickly to the US and also countries such as Russia from the Eastern side.
  - drpgq 14y ago
    Canada would be nice, although dealing with the Rogers/Bell/Telus troika might be difficult.
vidarh 14y ago
The problem with this, which I learned the hard way with my first startup, is that roaming costs are not high because of some horrible inefficiency in the telco's charging them, but because they all benefit from the status quo. My first company was an ISP, and we thought the then current dial up prices (1995) were insane, and quickly worked out we could offer packages at 25% of the largest competitor and make a profit with only 1500 or so users. Problem was, the largest competitors could also make a profit at 25% of their then-current prices, and had large established user-bases. We were inexperienced enough in business to not worry too much about why their prices were to high - we assumed without thinking that their prices reflected their cost base. Instead it reflected their belief about the market at a time - they'd rather sell at that price with a ridiculous margin, than cut the price and grow the total size of the market. We went in cocky about a big competitive advantage, and it took about 3 days after launch before the incumbent dropped prices to match ours, and while we kept growing, it obviously made things a lot harder. This company might find the same in the mobile data market if they get any traction at all: Many of their competitors can drop the roaming charges massive pretty much over-night, have large warchests, and have roaming agreements in place that can quickly be re-negotiated if they and their partners start seeing this startup as a threat to their revenues. The massive benefit they can provide now, and the seeming headstart they have on their competitors can evaporate pretty much overnight.
- hatu 14y ago
  Wait, you guys dropped the price of dialups for customers by 75% nation-wide and you're still disappointed?
  - Gravityloss 14y ago
    Yes, sounds like the free market worked great for the customer!
- lolcraft 14y ago
  Well, it makes sense from the point of view of the telcos, if I'm reading it correctly. In a very competitive market that can't really expand by much, such as this one, there exists a "perverse" incentive for all competitors to implicitly collude in a price point much above reasonable, since noone stands to win much by lowering prices, but all stand to lose. Until a bright, young startup comes and fucks it up. The requirement of total competitivity in the market is needed for this to happen, so that no agent can win persistently through competitive advantage. Then, any lowering of prices is futile; it becomes a game of musical chairs, in which the telcos are constantly lowering prices until loss of profit, and costumers are just swapping between one and the others. So it's not done. Basic micro. Of course, if the market can tolerate growth, then you lower prices just enough to get the largest market share. I guess this is yet another reminder that markets do not care for global optima, just for Nash equilibria. Right now, I'm thanking those individuals, specially R Telecomunicaciones, that disrupted the Spanish telecom market with a cavalier disregard for massive profits.
hatu 14y ago
How does Amazon accomplish their free 3G with the Kindle and why aren't they selling this service? http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab
- brazzy 14y ago
  > How does Amazon accomplish their free 3G with the Kindle and why aren't they selling this service? It's not "free 3G", it's "free ebook shop browsing and delivery via 3G" - relatively small files, and Amazon directly profits from each one. Thus they can afford to pay for it, and they're big enough to negotiate reasonable prices. But note that it's very limited: audio books are not delivered via 3G, nor are files sent in by the user for conversion (actually I believe you can pay for that service). And for their 70% royalty option, delivery is actually charged to the author at 15 cents per MB: http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/ http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-ind...
  - PanMan 14y ago
    Still, 15 cents is a price I would pay for data worldwide...
dbuxton 14y ago
I use Tru (formerly Truphone) which covers UK, US and Oz, I assume through the sorts of deals that these guys have pulled off. It's a fabulous idea but badly executed (despite the fact that they have raised oodles of VC money) with poor call quality and slow (2G) data speeds. Still, so much easier than buying a SIM in the US. Also, has the wonderful property that you can call someone who is physically in the US on their UK mobile number for free for both parties - for which incoming call (for those of you who don't know how backwards the US cell market is in comparison with regulated Europe) a US cell customer would normally have to pay! That said, if you mainly travel to the US and don't want to deal with T-Mobile or Virgin or whoever, I heartily recommend them.
- smikolay 14y ago
  I've been playing with toggle (www.togglemobile.co.uk) as it covers more countries than Tru. They use their parent's MVNO network (Lyca Mobile), and actually manage decent prices in a number of European countries (and free incoming calls in a number more around the world). The data offering isn't as wide spread, and they currently only offer per MB outside UK; but still a better deal than roaming.

79 points by dsarle 14y ago

Interesting, but their site seems light on details. Under Coverage, they just have "throughout Europe", which doesn't tell much (Europe is a rather poorly-defined concept). In any case, 40+€ seems expensive unless you travel a lot.

flexie 14y ago
40-80 EUR is not that bad compared to many single country subscriptions in Scandinavia. Depends on whether it includes data traffic, free talk etc. If this works as advertised I believe it will be a game changer. The EU maximum roaming charges[1] have to some extend compensated for the lack of competition but this would be even better. 1: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/tariffs/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/t...
- untog 14y ago
  It's still a lot compared to just buying a PAYG SIM card when you arrive in a country. I tend not to travel between ten different countries, I'm usually back and forth between two or three. I can swap out SIM cards when I arrive and carry on like nothing ever happened. If you get a SkypeIn number you can just remap it to a different local number whenever you change SIM cards, it works great.
- taneliv 14y ago
  What? I pay 13€ / month for unlimited 15Mbps 3G in Finland, and kids have 5 € / month unlimited 0.5Mbps 3G. They all include some text and voice, and the coverage is spotless for daily commute and holidays. Where do you consider 40 € / month to be "not that bad" for similar connectivity? OTOH, roaming fees while traveling can easily burn through several hundreds of euros, making 40-80 € / month a good plan even if you travel only once a year (but need data while traveling). Just the downloading the maps for navigating from airport to hotel and checking your email may cost more than a hundred euros (been there, done that).

jtheory 14y ago

This sounded very cool for a minute -- I'm mostly based in France, sometimes the UK, but now I'm in Malaysia for a month, and will be in the US probably later this year for a chunk of time. ...but the title was seriously misleading (just Europe, and not even specifying which countries yet); I'm still going to have massive roaming charges if I don't switch SIMs. How hard is it to put "...eliminates European data roaming costs forever"? My current solution is multiple SkypeIn numbers -- you can call me in the US or UK, for example, and either number will forward to my current (local) mobile number, which I don't give out. The only serious flaw with this approach is SMS -- SkypeIn can't accept (and/or forward SMS), even to my Skype account.

dsarle 14y ago
Good point about the title. But to answer your question, as far as I know Ukko told me that they want to expand quickly to the US and also countries such as Russia from the Eastern side.
- drpgq 14y ago
  Canada would be nice, although dealing with the Rogers/Bell/Telus troika might be difficult.

vidarh 14y ago

The problem with this, which I learned the hard way with my first startup, is that roaming costs are not high because of some horrible inefficiency in the telco's charging them, but because they all benefit from the status quo. My first company was an ISP, and we thought the then current dial up prices (1995) were insane, and quickly worked out we could offer packages at 25% of the largest competitor and make a profit with only 1500 or so users. Problem was, the largest competitors could also make a profit at 25% of their then-current prices, and had large established user-bases. We were inexperienced enough in business to not worry too much about why their prices were to high - we assumed without thinking that their prices reflected their cost base. Instead it reflected their belief about the market at a time - they'd rather sell at that price with a ridiculous margin, than cut the price and grow the total size of the market. We went in cocky about a big competitive advantage, and it took about 3 days after launch before the incumbent dropped prices to match ours, and while we kept growing, it obviously made things a lot harder. This company might find the same in the mobile data market if they get any traction at all: Many of their competitors can drop the roaming charges massive pretty much over-night, have large warchests, and have roaming agreements in place that can quickly be re-negotiated if they and their partners start seeing this startup as a threat to their revenues. The massive benefit they can provide now, and the seeming headstart they have on their competitors can evaporate pretty much overnight.

hatu 14y ago
Wait, you guys dropped the price of dialups for customers by 75% nation-wide and you're still disappointed?
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  Yes, sounds like the free market worked great for the customer!
lolcraft 14y ago
Well, it makes sense from the point of view of the telcos, if I'm reading it correctly. In a very competitive market that can't really expand by much, such as this one, there exists a "perverse" incentive for all competitors to implicitly collude in a price point much above reasonable, since noone stands to win much by lowering prices, but all stand to lose. Until a bright, young startup comes and fucks it up. The requirement of total competitivity in the market is needed for this to happen, so that no agent can win persistently through competitive advantage. Then, any lowering of prices is futile; it becomes a game of musical chairs, in which the telcos are constantly lowering prices until loss of profit, and costumers are just swapping between one and the others. So it's not done. Basic micro. Of course, if the market can tolerate growth, then you lower prices just enough to get the largest market share. I guess this is yet another reminder that markets do not care for global optima, just for Nash equilibria. Right now, I'm thanking those individuals, specially R Telecomunicaciones, that disrupted the Spanish telecom market with a cavalier disregard for massive profits.

hatu 14y ago

How does Amazon accomplish their free 3G with the Kindle and why aren't they selling this service? http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab

brazzy 14y ago
> How does Amazon accomplish their free 3G with the Kindle and why aren't they selling this service? It's not "free 3G", it's "free ebook shop browsing and delivery via 3G" - relatively small files, and Amazon directly profits from each one. Thus they can afford to pay for it, and they're big enough to negotiate reasonable prices. But note that it's very limited: audio books are not delivered via 3G, nor are files sent in by the user for conversion (actually I believe you can pay for that service). And for their 70% royalty option, delivery is actually charged to the author at 15 cents per MB: http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/ http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-ind...
- PanMan 14y ago
  Still, 15 cents is a price I would pay for data worldwide...

dbuxton 14y ago

I use Tru (formerly Truphone) which covers UK, US and Oz, I assume through the sorts of deals that these guys have pulled off. It's a fabulous idea but badly executed (despite the fact that they have raised oodles of VC money) with poor call quality and slow (2G) data speeds. Still, so much easier than buying a SIM in the US. Also, has the wonderful property that you can call someone who is physically in the US on their UK mobile number for free for both parties - for which incoming call (for those of you who don't know how backwards the US cell market is in comparison with regulated Europe) a US cell customer would normally have to pay! That said, if you mainly travel to the US and don't want to deal with T-Mobile or Virgin or whoever, I heartily recommend them.

smikolay 14y ago
I've been playing with toggle (www.togglemobile.co.uk) as it covers more countries than Tru. They use their parent's MVNO network (Lyca Mobile), and actually manage decent prices in a number of European countries (and free incoming calls in a number more around the world). The data offering isn't as wide spread, and they currently only offer per MB outside UK; but still a better deal than roaming.