The deal, announced yesterday, formalises ties between operators to improve GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and Caller Line Identification (CLI) and other mobile services across five Asia-Pacific countries.
Telstra joined four other regional telcos--CSL (Hong Kong), Maxis (Malaysia), MobileOne (Singapore) and Smart (Philippines) in forging the alliance.
Up till now there have only been piecemeal data roaming arrangements between these operators, said Chua Swee Kiat, spokesman for Singapore's MobileOne.
The deal, named the Asian Mobility Initiative (AMI), aims to "provide subscribers...with the same standards of seamless and reliable data communications that they currently enjoy today with voice calls," said the joint statement.
In addition to roaming, the members will also share portal content, such as games and information services, as well as jointly develop mobile applications, said Chua.
Foong King Yew, principal analyst with Gartner Asia Pacific said "through this move, current AMI members like Telstra, Smart, and MobilOne can also address the service differentiation threat from SingTel Mobile, which can also offer similar services via its affiliates in Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and India," he said.
Singapore Telecommunications owns SingTel Optus, the number two telecommunications player in Australia.
He also said the deal will give a competitive edge to telecommunications companies faced with falling average revenue per user.
He added that to make a go of it, AMI needs to stress benefits to the user.
"In the past, operators have made the mistake of focusing to much on the technology alone and this should be avoided," he said.
Sandra Ng, vice president of communications research at IDC, said she believed that demand for mobile data roaming "definitely exists". "The question is at what level, and this largely depends on pricing and availability, as well as how user-friendly it is for the user community--devices, infrastructure, security, billing, speed and quality of service," she said.
"Roaming has always been a challenging issue for many telcos because it involves multiple parties," she said.
To make the venture work, she said overcoming technical problems such as billing would be a start, but success also depended on user-friendliness, convenience and how seamless the coverage is going to be.
Yesterday's announcement follows on the heels of an agreement signed last month between Asia-Pacific broadband providers to beef up wireless LAN (WLAN) roaming. Some see WLAN complementing mobile data; others see it as a competing service.
