Data roaming on ships (MCP network)
 

Giffgaff in the UK has announced that it will no longer support roaming on Maritime Communications Partner, a network that supplies GSM connectivity via satellite on board ships. From reading a thread in which giffgaff announced this disconnection, it turns out that a huge number of those working on board cruise ships use giffgaff's £2.50/month Blackberry option because it allows 10MB/day of inclusive data on old Blackberrys. I'm guessing that many of these giffgaff customers are not UK-based. Clearly giffgaff found it cannot afford to give away 300MB/month of data roaming for £2.50/month, particularly on an expensive satellite network like MCP. However, rather than simply excluding MCP from its Blackberry option, giffgaff is cancelling its roaming agreement with MCP altogether.

Can anyone recommend an international SIM card for these many soon-to-be-ex-giffgaff customers? It will need to support data roaming on MCP.

Ha. I asked giffgaff over 4 years ago about the cost of calls and data roaming on ships and aircraft, to help answer a query on their forum when it was a lot less busy, and never actually got a straight answer, even when 2 managers separately responded to me after I said that some agent queries get referred to head office and never answered.

One intermediate answer was there were no such arrangements, which seemed odd given that one cross channel ferry produced a connection and welcome to Malta text messages.

There might be a solution. In WorldSIM's full PDF price list, MCP is listed under Norway, which is charged at WorldSIM's "Euro Zone" rates, i.e. £0.10/MB (£100/GB), outgoing calls to EU countries at 15p/min, free incoming calls at all times (via a UK number), SMS at £0.05 each.