Vodafone Group Plc today announces it is the first mobile operator to offer
commercial GPRS roaming across Europe. Vodafone customers in 12 countries
including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK will be able to access their
Vodafone services over GPRS in a growing number of destinations when
travelling in Europe. Vodafone intends to progressively expand GPRS roaming
to cover other networks, including all remaining European Vodafone operators
and partner networks by the end of the year.
Vodafone customers will be able to seamlessly access services such as
corporate e-mail, intranet and personalised information on their mobile
phones, lap tops or PDAs over GPRS. Customers will experience the same
Vodafone "look and feel" and will receive the same consistent levels of
Vodafone service performance and security which they experience on their home
Vodafone networks.
Ease of use is the key to Vodafone's GPRS roaming service. Vodafone
customers travelling abroad access their GPRS services in exactly the same way
as they do at home. There is no requirement for customers to input additional
service access codes to use their services. An inherent characteristic of all
Vodafone global services is that they are easy to use wherever you are and by
accessing their services over GPRS, customers will benefit from faster
download speeds and "always on", mobile connectivity.
Vodafone customers will be billed on a volume basis for accessing their
data services over GPRS whilst roaming in Europe. GPRS is a packet switched
based service, so customers only pay for the amount of data they download and
send, rather than the amount of time they spend accessing their services.
Thomas Geitner, Chief Executive, Global Products and Services, Vodafone,
said:
"Vodafone customers are the first to benefit from fast and easy access to
their data services across a large part of Europe. Our travelling customers
will now be able to access their data services as easily as they do at home.
This means greater productivity and ease of use for our customers and the
ability to stay in touch with colleagues, friends and family whilst
travelling.
"Our ability to deliver commercial GPRS roaming in Europe through the
Vodafone footprint will unlock our corporate customers' requirement for access
to data services whilst travelling, which will generate new data roaming
revenue."