Vodafone To Offer Europe-wide Daily Flat Data Rate

The practicality of using cellular data service while you’re abroad hasn’t been high, unless your company doesn’t mind paying the crazy rates that has been data-roaming.

Sanity appears to have been reached by Vodafone, as they announce a flat-rate of €12/day for data in Europe – but only if accessed from “mobile-enable laptops” from 1 July 2007. It will replace their current per Megabyte service, giving what they say is “practically unlimited data usage,” which is actually up to 50Mb/day.

We asked Vodafone for clarification as to what “mobile-enable laptops” were and they said the service would be open to any laptop user who has a datacard, or a mobile phone with modem – as long as they opted-in to the service. The opt-in is free of charge.

Back in June 2005, Vodafone offered a months worth of data roaming for €75, but only included 100Mb in the service – the equivalent of two days data limit for the new service.

Vodafone have been running a voice equivalent roaming service, Vodafone Passport, for two years now, which they claim has 12m users. They tell us that they’ve yet to come up with a swish name for the equivalent data service.

The EU has been on at mobile phone companies to make their European voice roaming charges more reasonable for a while – in fact Vodafone pre-empted any action by the EU, by announcing a dropping their prices a year before they were going to do it.