SK Telecom Improves Roaming Services
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
SK Telecom, the country's largest mobile telephony operator, is vowing to cut out all complications in roaming services, allowing outbound travelers to use their phones just the way they do here.
The company's "T-Roaming Perfect" service enables users to make calls by dialing the same numbers they use at home in foreign countries, relieving them of the trouble of memorizing the country codes and city prefix numbers of their locations.
The handsets will also be displaying incoming caller IDs, just as if the user were in Korea.
"The idea is to enable users to use the same numbers they have saved on their handsets abroad as they do at home. And since they will be providing incoming caller IDs, the users will be able to better manage the voice rates they use abroad, considering that roaming services charge both for calls sent and received," said an SK Telecom spokesman.
Previously, Korean travelers in foreign countries needed to choose a telephone operator, then dial 82, the country code of South Korea, then the local prefix code minus the zero in front, and then insert the phone number to reach a person back home.
SK Telecom's revamped roaming service will allow them to just dial the phone numbers directly.
"For example, instead of dialing +82-10-1234-5678 and whatever comes in front of it, T-Roaming customers would just have to dial 010-1234-5678 as they do in Korea," he said.
"We have evaluated the usage patterns of our roaming customers in the past years, and more than half of their sent calls were for people back in Korea, and there was a need to develop services that are more attentive to these users. The T-Roaming Service will be a basic function provided on handsets, and we will not charge subscription or basic fees separately."
The T-Roaming Perfect service is currently available on SK Telecom's smartphone models, such as the Samsung Electronics T-Omnia II and Motorola Motoroi, and will be available on all handsets, both smartphones and conventional feature phones, the carrier releases from now on.