Paying up for roaming from home

By PAUL BRISLEN

Woosh wireless broadband customers are discovering they can take their portable connection with them to other cities - but at a cost.

Woosh will begin charging $20 plus GST a month or a casual rate of 10c a megabyte plus GST to roam to other cities on its network.

Woosh has more than 5000 customers on its network in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Invercargill.

But the company has never flagged the roaming charges over four generations of its advertising campaign.

Marketing manager Sandra Geange says Woosh always intended to charge roaming fees for anyone who wanted to use the service away from home.

"It's just a bit of a commercial reality for us that we have costs of rolling out the network and running the service. We need to charge for the additional benefits."

Geange said the ability to roam was a "competitive advantage" for Woosh and a big point of difference between Woosh's network and its competitors'.

"We've made it very much value for money compared with the likes of [Telecom's] Mobile JetStream or Vodafone's data card service."

Both Telecom and Vodafone offer mobile data services based on their cellular networks with prices ranging from $8 a megabyte for casual usage.

Telecom also recently launched its wireless hotspot service for Xtra customers. That service is available through a growing number of hotels around the country at a rate of $8.84 plus GST for each hour of use.

"We did talk to our customers about it and they see it as a major point of difference that you can just pick up your laptop and modem and use it in any of those major metros. They were quite happy to pay what they see as a reasonable fee for the service."

One Freemans Bay customer who did not want to be named said he was told nothing of the possibility of roaming charges when he signed up for the service.

"It certainly wasn't part of the original package," said the Woosh user, who found the service reliable but was disappointed in the delays to the launch of Woosh's voice service. It had been a big feature in the Woosh sales pitch but was still not commercially available.

Alistair Kerdar, owner of Auckland-based Aurora Design, said it hadn't been an issue before.

"It's only now they've got the ability to roam that it's come to the fore."

Kerdar said he would reluctantly pay the fee if he were to roam but was happy the service was still free within city limits.

The roaming charges, which take effect from September 1, apply to customers who want to use the service more than 50km from their usual address.