Peter Griffin: Passport buys you the world

There's one thing Kiwis working in London covet more than anything else - a British passport that will let them come and go from the country as they please. I'm after a different sort of passport, one that will let me use my phone in the UK and not get crucified by the mobile phone companies on roaming charges.

You see, the British have since last year been able to take advantage of Vodafone Passport, which promises to let you stay on your home rates while you travel abroad.

Take a trip to Spain, for instance, and pay 70p per call plus the per-minute rate you are charged back home. You pay as though you were making a local call on your mobile in Britain.

An added bonus is that you can use your free minute allocation while you're travelling. A 10-minute call from Spain may cost you just 75p if you have enough free minutes. Normally it would cost three times that.

Vodafone's rejig of roaming charges has sent ripples through the European mobile industry and is likely to force other operators to lower their charges.

The Passport deal even extends to Britons travelling to New Zealand and Australia. Sadly, the benefits don't extend so well in the opposite direction.

New Zealand Vodafone customers can roam to Australia and pay the same price for local calls there as they would in New Zealand. But in terms of them being able to reap the benefits of Passport in other countries, they're out of luck, destined to pay the roaming charges.

Those charges can be hefty. An on-account call back to New Zealand from a roaming Vodafone phone will cost $2.80-$3.85 a minute depending on the time of day. Calls made within Britain cost 50c-$1.20 a minute.

On the continent it becomes a lot more expensive. From Italy, a call back to New Zealand on Vodafone Omnitel will cost $7.35 a minute. National calls cost $1.30 a minute.

Imagine being able to make a call back to New Zealand for, say, a $2.50 flat-rate charge then use your free minutes to cover the cost of the call itself. It means you actually would call home on your mobile rather than using a cheap calling-card that routes your call over a patchy internet connection.

Vodafone chief executive Russell Stanners says it's hard to integrate New Zealand into Passport because of our distance from Europe.

The ironic thing is that when New Zealanders travel overseas with their mobile phones, they don't generally go to Europe. America, Australia and Asia are more popular destinations. Australia alone counts for 80 per cent of roaming activity.

In those countries, Vodafone doesn't have the dominance it has in Europe where, in most countries, it owns a network or has a share in one.

Even America is off-limits to British Vodafone Passport customers at the moment.

But Stanners says Vodafone is working on bringing New Zealand into the fold. The reality is that nasty roaming charges as we know them now will disappear. It's not a matter of if, just when and the sooner those travelling can get a passport of the mobile variety, the better.

www.vodafone.co.uk