M1, Singapore’s third largest mobile operator, introduced two new regional data roaming packages covering major tourist and business destinations across Asia.

The SGD50 ($35) per month Asia Data Passport covers customers data roaming across 22 Asian countries including China, Japan, India, Nepal and South Korea. The ASEAN Data Passport, available for SGD25 per month, allows customers to use their local data bundle in nine destinations including Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Data roaming usage on the relevant networks is deducted from the local data bundle of a customer’s mobile plan.

Customers requiring larger data bundles will be able to boost their packages with an “upsized data” purchase, M1 said. Bundles are available from SGD5.90 for up to 12GB and SGD17.70 for up to 36GB more data.

M1’s special roaming offers were recently expanded to eight new countries, including Brunei, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam.

P. Subramaniam, M1’s CMO, said since launching its data passport plans in July 2015 the number of destinations increased from six to 56 destinations. He said the number of M1 customers using the data roaming services more than doubled, with roaming traffic increasing threefold.

M1 also announced three new 4G data plans to give customers more flexibility. The new plans offer 1GB of local data at SGD10.70 and up to 23GB of local data for SGD68.60.

The operator in January achieved data rates of 35Gb/s in a pre-5G demonstration conducted with Huawei using millimetre wave (mmWave) technology in the 73GHz band.

M1 is also (seperately) exploring an expansion of a network sharing agreement with rival StarHub.