Is the International Long-Distance Cash Cow Endangered?

International long distance calling and data roaming are the two remaining big ticket cash cows available to carriers. T-Mobile US and Truphone have taken a shot across the bow at different aspects of the traditional per-minute money maker and other companies might follow their lead.

Certainly, international long distance voice calling has eroded over the years by Skype and Skype-like services, not to mention pre-paid calling cards and "free" IP-based voice services. International long-distance services have been an arbitrage game, with buyers hunting around for the best per-minute pricing and carriers trying to find deals with wholesale and in-country carriers to get the lowest pricing per minute to market up, with many deals pegged at pennies and fractions thereof per minute.

T-Mobile US is now offering two international flat rate data plans for business customers, with access to 150 MB, 400 MB, 1 GB or 2 GB of international high-speed at "competitive and predictable rates" with no international roaming tools or overage charges on T-Mobile's partner networks. For $25 per month, customers can get 150 MB of data while $120 per month (plus taxes and fees) will get the business traveler up to 1 GB of high speed data in 119 destinations around the world.

Drew Kelton, T-Mobile's executive vice president of B2B, said that the corporate billing department wants predictability and is willing to pay a little extra upfront rather than paying more on the backend with overage charges and roaming rates.

"There's much less to lose by going hard on a flat rate proper, than with network roaming," said Kelton at an interview on the floor of CTIA last week. "You play into a flat rate ecosystem and this makes sense. It's easy for [the customer], easy to be accounted for. It's easy to attach attribution to it. One of the biggest challenges is to do allocated billing."

Upstart VoIP provider and SIM card player Truphone rolled out shared international mobile service plans for data, text and voice at CTIA, enabling businesses to share local minutes, messages and data from a single bundle, regardless of where calls are made. If calls are made anywhere in the "Truphone Zone," calls can be billed locally. Since Truphone owns and operates its own GSM-based network, a single SIM card can be assigned multiple international numbers.

Currently, Australia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States are all part of the Truphone zone, with Germany, Poland and Spain to be added later this year.

Flat rate international data roaming is likely to play havoc with many carrier plans to milk 3G and LTE data roaming for additional profits. At best, it will force incumbents to be more sensitive to data roaming and international long distance pricing.