Two winters ago, on a three-month work-travel trip in Mexico, my ex-boyfriend and I entered a cell phone conundrum. How would he take calls from his business partner on his mobile without paying ten times the peso? How would I call home to let my parents know that I hadn’t hit a burro while we drove Mexico’s two-lane highways? For communication back home, we jumped through various corporate hoops, which is something I’ve come to expect while living in the land of corporations.
AT&T (or Cingular, as it was at the time) wanted to charge us a monthly fee to even use his cell phone in Mexico, and on top of that, $0.25 per minute so none of his monthly minutes applied. Meanwhile, a friend of ours was hopping off the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow and bought himself an unlocked mobile phone, a SIM card, and called us in Mexico for only a little more than calling Gorbachev down the street.
We tried our friend’s trick, but spent days trying to unlock my boyfriend’s tri-band GSM phone. AT&T/Cingular would text us codes to unlock his phone, which required a call back to the states (at the $0.25 per minute rate) to have them type in the exact code that they had already texted us. It became our corporate cat and mouse game, one that never seemed to work to our advantage, or to simply unlock our phone. The two times they texted us the code, they had one wrong number or letter. We started to wonder if they were doing this on purpose, to punish us for asking for the unlock code to bypass their international plan’s exorbitant roaming fees. Meanwhile, we moaned because we knew there was a business idea in all this madness.
In this global economy, with more people doing their work via the internet from anywhere in the world (like ourselves), business travelers don’t need to be punished for keeping in touch with colleagues, or Mom. Someone had to invent a service that gave these users the same service as the European sipping espresso at the next table. Someone had to invent a service that put the customer back into the equation.
