FreeMove, the mobile alliance between Orange, TeliaSonera, Telecom Italia Group and T-Mobile, has announced the launch of a new range of data roaming offers enabling multinational customers to manage roaming costs more effectively and efficiently. Customers can benefit from the offers when roaming across FreeMove's footprint of 32 countries in Europe, providing a consistent approach, it says.
The FreeMove Data Roaming Portfolio offers a range of services which have been specifically designed to meet the varying needs of European business travellers using different devices to communicate, whether it's a laptop or smartphone. The portfolio includes the following:
- The FreeMove European Daily Pass provides the traveller with up to 50MB of roaming data for the day for a fixed fee as soon as they connect in a European country. This package represents great value to laptop users who travel occasionally within Europe, offering predictable prices whichever country they are in.
- FreeMove European Monthly Bundle is targeted at frequent European business travellers and provides 100MB of data per month for a flat fee. Aimed at laptop users, the price per MB is lower than standard Pay As You Go (PAYG) tariffs and the bundle provides predictable costs to businesses.
- FreeMove International Data Roaming allows less frequent travellers to access their e-mails through their laptop or smartphone as and when they need to for a standard PAYG fee. The service divides the world into four zones and charges customers per MB prices based on where they connect from in the world.
The packages are currently available to business travellers based in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In addition, the European Daily Pass and International Data Roaming offers are available now in Norway and Denmark, with the European Monthly Bundle option becoming available in these countries later in 2010. The offers will be available in Finland and Lithuania later this year.
The offers are ‘network independent', removing the need for customers to manually select a locally preferred network to get the best price. In addition, the European ‘zone' is almost identical for all countries offering the package. This means it is simple for an enterprise customer to understand and implement the FreeMove Data Roaming Portfolio for users based in different European countries via their FreeMove Global Account Manager.
"Increasingly, large enterprises are looking to make their workforce more mobile and the issue of data roaming has moved further up the IT agenda," said Derek Austin, Head of Marketing, FreeMove.
"Where before businesses have been cautious to provide access to data roaming services to their employees, these new services from FreeMove provide cost-effective access which is both predictable and manageable. The end result is a highly mobilised and more efficient workforce. Furthermore, the bundles are easy to deploy and coupled with the FreeMove Global Account Manager, businesses are now better equipped to streamline their management of mobile services."
Fabien Gustafsson, General Manager, FreeMove, commented: "this latest development is a market-leading offer, helping international companies keep their business travellers connected and in control, whilst lowering costs and making managing mobility even simpler. It further underlines FreeMove's on-going commitment to meet the needs of multinational customers in Europe and beyond. With the combined strength and experience of our members, we believe FreeMove delivers the best mobile communications experience to multinational businesses. "