T-Mobile USA promised to do more to cater to the enterprise, and now it’s delivering. The carrier is offering more attractive pricing for voice and data roaming for multinational corporations (MNCs) and U.S. companies that conduct business internationally.
T-Mobile Global for Business, for $9.99 a month, is a pay-per-use plan with discounts as high as 80 percent on international voice and data in more than 200 countries. In China, for example, the voice rate is 49 cents per minute and $2 per meg for data. The same goes for the United Kingdom. In India, the rate is $1.79 for voice roaming and $2 per meg for data, representing a 22 percent discount on voice and 87 percent discount on data.
The new rates are result of concerted efforts on the part of T-Mobile and parent company Deutsche Telekom AG to re-negotiate and re-structure roaming agreements with partners around the globe. The carrier wanted to make sure it came out with a broad offering rather than just a few countries, explains Frank Sickinger, vice president, B2B, MNC and federal government at T-Mobile USA.
The emphasis on multinational corporations isn’t entirely new and probably not surprising given the company’s CEO and president, Philipp Humm, previously headed T-Mobile in Germany and brought a renewed emphasis on the business segment. In November, T-Mobile announced it was joining the FreeMove Alliance, a mobile telecom alliance spanning Europe.
Sickinger says one of T-Mobile’s customers that does a lot of international roaming can save just shy of $100,000 a month with the new offer – yes, that’s $100,000 a month. Some companies will see savings on the order of 75 percent for voice calls and almost 87 percent for data. The data rates apply to not only smartphones but tablets, data sticks and the like.
It’s worth noting that with T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling, businesses can save even more. T-Mobile’s entire BlackBerry line and almost all its Android devices come with UMA or GAN-Lite out of the box, Sickinger says, and it’s a commercial-grade service. Whatever traveling customers do on Wi-Fi is treated like an international long distance call rather than a roaming connection, which costs more.
The top countries where T-Mobile USA customers are roaming include Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, China and Brazil.
