Roaming charges alert

EXPATS flying home for Christmas or enjoying a family trip abroad during the school break should not suffer the roaming charge blues over the festive season.

Batelco has initiated a campaign to help their customers to avoid high data roaming charges while they travel internationally.

The telecom company has noticed that with the increasing popularity of smart phones which support the use of many applications that use data roaming, some of its customers are unwittingly running up big bills while they travel outside of Bahrain for business and leisure.

Although customers receive automated messages with full details of the roaming rates charged by the local providers for voice, SMS and data as soon as they land in a new overseas destination, some customers do not keep track of their data usage, are unaware they can switch off the roaming application and are left fuming over their bills afterwards. 

Batelco is introducing a new automated messaging service that will alert customers when they have reached a data usage bill of BD30, BD80 and BD200 and the roaming data usage notification counter will be reset on the first day of every month.

The move has come too late for one Janabiya expat housewife who landed with a BD450 bill after a family summer holiday to Thailand. “My husband was furious but I had no idea about roaming charges when I bought my iPhone and it came as a terrible shock when we arrived back in Bahrain. The message system should help other customers from suffering the same fate.”

The message they will receive reads: ‘Dear customer, your roaming data usage has reached BDxx for this month. To disable your data, refer to your device data settings. Your roaming data usage is calculated and reset every calendar month’.

On another important point, customers who have mobile packages which include free data MB’s or GB’s and unlimited data should also be aware that the free data allowances are only applicable for local usage and do not apply while roaming. Also, the customers’ credit limits do not apply during roaming so it is possible to exceed any pre-set credit limit while roaming internationally.

Batelco general manager media relations Ahmed Al Janahi stressed that if customers prefer not to use data whilst roaming, they must turn off ‘data roaming’ on their handsets as soon as they leave Bahrain.

“If data roaming remains active, even if the customer does not use the email or browser, many of the applications on a smart phone continue to update in the background and such activity uses data continuously.”