In our search for Canada's Worst Cellphone Bill, we heard a lot of horror stories about data roaming costs.
If you travel outside of the country, cellphone providers charge a premium for data usage, mostly on either a per-kilobyte or per-megabyte basis.
"It’s a very difficult thing to understand," says Professor Srinivasan Keshav of the University of Waterloo, a wireless technology expert. "It’s like somebody telling you your car can go no faster than 1.6 centimeters per millisecond. But it means nothing to you. If I told you it was 60 kilometres an hour, now you know."
Keshav says in one case, it cost a Fido customer $1 per second to check her email while in England. But the actual cost to the U.K. carrier would be about one-third of a cent per second.
"The true costs are actually very, very slightly more than what it costs a local customer," he says. "The profits are enormous... it is in the best interest for both these providers to charge each others' customers as high a price as they can get away with, because that’s just profit that they then give to each other."
We put Professor Keshav's cost analysis to Rogers (which owns Fido) and here's an excerpt of what they had to say:
First off we should mention that we are first in Canada this week to launch our Onerate package for North American roaming which allows customers the flexibility and convenience to use their device’s data capabilities (email, mobile web surfing, downloading documents) the same way they would at home, without incurring roaming fees when using data within their monthly allotment. More to come from Rogers over the next few months.
Rogers has over 200 roaming partners worldwide and agreements are negotiated on a case by case basis and are based on a multitude of factors. Hence, one cannot generalize an average cost across the board. What we can say is that the average wholesale cost of a roaming text message is significantly more expensive than what professor Kehsav quoted.
Related Link:
 In the European Union, where cross-country travel is almost a way of life, roaming fees were capped under regulation as lawmakers there considered fees charged by providers to be a "rip-off".
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