Vodafone New Zealand have announced a significant increase in the overseas coverage footprint of its $5 daily roaming offering.
Vodafone's $5 offering now allows you to use your mobile phone in 72 countries and pay only $5 per day for all usage - all inbound and outbound voice calls, TXT messages and data will be deducted from your existing plan allocation allowing you to continue using your phone just as you would in New Zealand.
This offering is unmatched in the New Zealand marketplace and means Vodafone have a significant lead over both Spark and 2degrees in terms of roaming offerings.
The expansion of the footprint includes some increasingly popular destinations for New Zealand travellers including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa and Thailand.
As a Vodafone customer and frequent traveller I make extensive use of Vodafone's $5 roaming. It's far more convenient than having to swap for a local SIM card and means I can keep in touch with New Zealand and not have to worry about the price of voice calls or my data usage.
The only downside of roaming is data. It's an issue I touched on briefly in a post here on TravelTalk last week about staying in touch while in Europe.
Currently when roaming on any mobile network anywhere in the world all data traffic has to be tunneled back to the home network. This is something that will change in the future as networks eventally adopt the 3GPP local roaming breakout standard. If you're planning on extensive data usage travelling around Europe I highly recommend recommend a local SIM such as the Vodafone UK one as it removes the ~350ms of round trip latency that exists between New Zealand and Europe.
Vodafone's new list of countries will come as a bonus for many travellers who will now find staying in touch far easier while travelling.
