Earlier this week, CelcomDigi officially launched Spark, which is basically a rebranding of the original mobile brand, Yoodo. Like Yoodo, it operates on a 30-day active cycle, and offers new fixed plans to users who stayed on from the Yoodo days. Enticing as these plans are, though, the telco is currently suffering from one major problem: it’s international roaming services, or near lack thereof.
If you head over to the international roaming section of the app, as you would when it was Yoodo, you’ll now be greeted by a rather anaemic list of countries where it is accessible in. By anaemic, we mean three countries: Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Perhaps the most egregious change to Spark’s International Roaming plan is the allotted data, and its equally anorexic options. As of this publication, Spark is offering 1-day and 7-day validity passes to the available countries. The 1-day pass comes with a quota of 1GB for RM4, while the 7-day plan gets 3GB for RM10.
This is a far cry from what was previously offered when it was still Yoodo. Back then, its international roaming plan, Roam Like Home, covered 72 countries, and allowed you to use your local data abroad, with the cap being whatever your data cap and purchased plan was. Basically, if you had 85GB worth of data, you’d be able to use all of it until you exceeded the limit, at which point you’d get capped.
As a Yoodo user, the loss of international roaming to the majority of countries is a clear and definite blow to the convenience of it, as is the removal of the “unlimited” data access. It was one of the main appeals while travelling, being able to access your purchased data, anytime and anywhere.
We’ve reached out to CelcomDigi for a statement or explanation for the drastic change in its International Roaming plan. At the time of writing, we are still waiting for a response. We’re not discounting the likelihood that Spark will eventually add back more countries – the company’s help page states that it is adding more roaming passes but says nothing about increasing the quota – but we would definitely like an explanation as to why it won’t make itself available to more countries from the get-go.
