Got 2 hours before departuring for London Heathrow, so I thought I
should kill the time by updating my already-dying blog.
No, it's not dead. It's as alive as the 4SA '08 blog - there's no
heartbeat, and I'm the pacemaker with a plutonium battery keeping it
alive.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yesh, I just had this idea in my brain while I was sleeping (well,
what I really mean is "while I was trying to sleep")
If you're a millionaire with the capability of launching a multi-
national telecommunications company (I'm poking at companies like
Virgin Mobile, Singtel, Hutchinson, T-Mobile, Vodafone, etc.) , and
you think you can go as global as Coca-Cola, here's an idea that I
wanna pitch.
Imagine you buy a SIM-card from a certain telco carrier. Let's call
this carrier "X". X is a carrier in every country worldwide (or most
of them, anyway). So, X actually allows you to subscribe to a plan in
the base country that you're in - let's say Singapore, since that's
where most of my readers are, according to Google Analytics.
So, you're on a certain plan with X - 100min, 500 SMS, 10GB data plan,
S$50/mth. Now, imagine that that amount applies globally. So, if you
end up in Malaysia, you can still use the 100 min of airtime calls,
and you won't get roaming charges. Why? because you'll still be on the
X network, and they said you don't need to pay more to stay on their
network overseas. So you can actually have one SIM card, and when you
go to a certain country, you get a local number (but still on the same
SIM card) so that others can call you without paying IDD charges, and
you don't need to swap the SIM in your phone
The best part about this idea is that customers don't ever have to pay
roaming charges, and carriers can be bonded with their customers
wherever they go!
Another branch to this idea is one about global credit. You know how
you get a certain amount of minutes and SMS when you top up your pre-
paid/pay-as-you-go card? You can still have pre-paid cards in this X
network that I thought of, but rather than topping up your card with
different currencies, you'll top up with minutes. Let's say you're
paying S$10 for 100 "x-points", which allows 100 minutes of calling OR
500 SMSes OR 100MB of data. Then, if you go to the UK, they might
charge £5 for 100 "x-points". Yes, it's a points-based system, much
like the Microsoft Points system on X-Box Live. So you can have one
unified pricing system on the network, but still accept multiple
currencies globally.
I really think this idea could work.
there are some obstacles, I admit, that still need to be worked around:
1 - the local number thing, since having millions of new phone numbers
in every country might be a telco nightmare as they fight to get more
numbers in hundreds of different countries.
2 - setting up a global network, which means setting up a telco
company in every country. From tech support to signal level, the
company will have to hire equipments and staff all over the world. And
let's not forget the local legislation and administrative
requirements. This idea is not exactly going to be cheap.
Of course, you can work around number 2 by setting up a sort of
conglomerate like the Bridge Alliance - an alliance of the Singtel-
associated Telcos worldwide (Optus, Telkomsel, etc.) that offers a
Bridge DataRoam plan through these telcos. This Dataroam plan allows
you to use your data plan across the Bridge Alliance network. This is
the closest thing to my idea, with the exception that it's very
expensive, it's across multiple networks, you're still paying for
roaming (even though, let's be honest, they're all more-or-less one
company), it's not available for pre-paid customers, and it's not
global (it's regional, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, and yet,
it's not the whole region, but only "Singtel and friends").
I really think this idea could catch on.
Telcos, are you reading this?
