Droam is a personal hotspot device for local-charge 3G mobile data. After reading DROAM - Dreaming about cheap data roaming earlier this year, I’ve used Droam on three occasions: twice in the US and once in Spain.
During a week in NYC I used 1119 MB and paid €65 for Droam. At NOK 112 / MB, Telenor’s list price would have been €16000‼
€65 ⋘ €16000.
I also brought a Droam 1000 to Barcelona this summer, mostly as a backup since I expected the hotel to have a good, working connection. The in-room Wi-Fi turned out to be very unstable and the in-room Ethernet port was for decoration only and didn’t have a link at all. The Droam had already arrived and was waiting when I checked into the hotel, so problem solved.
Droam worked flawlessly. For interactive Terminal.app work, too. I kept it running almost continuously, either in my pocket or hanging from the wall charging.
Being a bit careless impatient, I still managed to use 62 MB through Telenor, at a price of NOK 846 or €105 before the DataControl Abroad warning SMS arrived.
Droam 1000 usage during this trip was an average of 362 MB/day for a total of 2,90 GB at a cost of €65 + €45 + €45 = €155.
Telenor’s price list for EU says max NOK 149 per day (up to 50 MB), but NOK 10/MB after max. I think this means that my daily 362 MB would be 50 MB @ 149 and then the remaining 312 MB @ 10/MB for a total of (149+3120) × 8 = NOK 26152 = €3269.
€155 ⋘ €3269.
Switching away isn’t an option in this case: Network Norway is more expensive at NOK 15 / MB for EU traffic. NetCom is also much more expensive at NOK 30 / MB, and they understandably won’t even let me link directly to their Spain prices. They also have something called European Connect 100 with daily intervals. It’s still NOK 10 / MB above 100 MB, but the first ten megabytes costs between 28-37 per MB. Perhaps they would be comparable to Telenor for my use after all, but I don’t think this kind of pricing is customer friendly.