Roaming

Happy New Year to You all! Wish the 2012 will be healthy, prosperous and favourable to everyone in every possible aspect. Suba Kamana!

Lot of requests and questions have been raised regarding roaming, please find my blog this time about the international issues. Roaming is very versatile and sometimes complicated issue, hope you find the following usefull. Tried to write it as general language as possible.

Traditionally, Roaming is defined (cf. GSM Association Permanent Reference Document AA.39) as the ability for a cellular customer to automatically make and receive voice calls, send and receive data, or access other services, including home data services, when travelling outside the geographical coverage area of the home network, by means of using a visited network.

So, if you travel to India and use Ncell SIM there by accessing e.g. Airtel, you are roaming. At Ncell we have postpaid roaming but also prepaid roaming (also known as Camel roaming). If you are prepaid customer the number of destinations is limited to 7 countries and only limited to voice roaming. The reason for the limited offering is the fact that in prepaid, both network should have real time charging and it is not that easy to arrange when billing systems are different. If you want to have good roaming facility and in more parts of the world, have the Pro schemes (post paid/paid in advance) with Ncell: we have roaming agreement with 249 operators in 87 countries for voice roaming, and 187 operators and 67 countries for data (GPRS) roaming.

Before you travel, have enough credit at your account, minimum of 10,000 NRS per week of roaming, according to our system. If do not want to use roaming, switch off the roaming in the settings of your phone. The rules between operators have been agreed so that as the caller is not able to know the location of the receiver, the receiving party pays the international part of the call. Means: you pay. According to the tariffs of the local network; the settlement is done between Ncell and foreign operator on monthly basis. You pay us and we pay the foreign operator. The caller in home country pays normal domestic tariff. Example: you as Ncell mobile customer call to your cousin in New York having Ncell SIM roaming at AT&T mobile network. You pay our normal rate 1.99 plus tax, your cousin pays as per the roaming tariff.

If you want to use data and/or mobile internet (also called as GPRS in telecom jargon) for your emails when abroad, we recommend using public Wi-Fi networks or Wi-Fi at hotels which has a fixed fee. No roaming charges. Settings at your phone to Wi-Fi on, and data roaming off. If you want to read your emails through your mobile phone, put the data roaming on instead but be prepared to pay for charges according local operator. By the way, the beauty of the BlackBerry phone is data compression: it uses only 10% of the data compared to other phones so reading emails while roaming is handy and cost effective. But please do not start surfing in the Internet that will cost you a lot! Actually, surfing at the Internet while roaming is the single biggest reason for huge bills; people often do not realize the fact so if you have Ncell Connect with roaming facility, do not put the data card in the laptop to avoid any bills. If you need to, use with care!

We have dedicated team of Account Managers for business customers and if (hopefully) you are our Pro customer, our people are there to help and answer to your questions. Or please call Corporate Customer Care at 9007. My advice is: please, study roaming before travelling! Checklist:

·       Find the roaming operators in your visit country at http://www.ncell.com.np/pro/roaming/international

·       Decide if you want to use roaming or not

·       Study how to change settings at your phone, do the settings before you leave Nepal

·       Have enough credit at your account

·       When arriving your destination country, be sure that you have desired settings at your phone

o   If you are not sure, keep it shut down or be prepared to pay the billJ

·       Sometimes you have to use Manual Search of the network to find the roaming operator

Enjoy your trip!
Regards,
Pasi

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