Celtel Nigeria Offers Data Roaming in UK, USA, Others

Celtel Nigeria is now offering data roaming services to its customers in many hot spots of the world including the United States of America, United Kingdom, Ghana, and Kenya.

Others include South Africa, the United Arab Emirate, Sri Lanka, and Gabon, Senegal and Kuwait. Customers of Celtel can now do data roaming on a number of mobile networks in several countries of the world such as Cingular in the USA, Cincinnati Bell Wireless, USA, Orange in the United Kingdom, DU of UAE, Vodacom in South Africa, Tigo (Millicom) of Ghana, Celtel Gabon, Celtel Uganda and Celtel Kenya.

Norman Moyo, Celtel’s chief marketing officer, said that the commencement of GPRS (General Packet for Radio Services) roaming opens Celtel customers to new realm of opportunities and possibilities even while away from their offices and home.

The company said the introduction of data roaming service via GPRS was made possible by the signing of agreement with several operators across the designated countries. "It fully complements our existing voice call roaming with more than 298 partners across the world," he explained.

Moyo said the introduction of the data roaming service will give customers of the company the opportunity to access or view and reply electronic mails (email), news and sports statistics on their phones while in the countries.

General Packet Radio Service or GPRS is a packet oriented Mobile Data Service available to GSM subscribers and users of GPRS enabled mobile phones. GPRS can be used for services such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) access, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and for Internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access.

The chief marketing officer further added that the service which is available to both prepaid and post paid customers of Celtel will enable subscribers on the network access to mobile Internet, gets and allow those who have MMS enabled phones compose and send messages with one or more multimedia parts while out of the country.

MMS is messaging systems that allows sending messages that include multimedia objects (images, audio, video, rich text) and not just text as in Short Message Service (SMS). Messaging systems allows phone users send messages that include multimedia objects (images, audio, video, rich text) in addition to text or Short Message Service (SMS).

Highlighting the benefits of the newly introduced service, Moyo said "Celtel is totally committed" to its corporate philosophy of making life better for all its customers irrespective of wherever they are, whether at home, in the office, in the market or out of the country

He said through the introduction of the service, Celtel is empowering its customers to maintain better family, social and business relationships both at home and abroad.

"Data roaming will no doubt help our customers to keep abreast with both current trends and events in their corporate offices. With this service, Celtel customers will never be denied of important information while outside the country."

Celtel Nigeria now has data roaming agreement with 13 countries including the United States of America (USA), UK, South Africa, the United Arab Emirate, and Ghana among others.

The data roaming service shares similar features with voice roaming. While voice roaming enables customers to make and receive calls outside the geographical location of their parent network, data roaming allows customers full access to GPRS service.