Well, they always had it... but with very high rates...

Is it a joke or have I missed something important about Iowa rural telephony :-)?

Iowa's the Liechtenstein, IoM and Jersey combined of the US telecom.

The standard interconnect rules don't apply there.

For some strange reason, a few local rural phone companies in Iowa are allowed to charge much higher termination fees that anyone else in the USA. This has brought about a number of services based in Iowa which take advantage of flat-rate long distance calling. You can call a number and get a free conference line, international dialing, etc. Your LD carrier eats the charge because they've sold a one-price-fits-all domestic LD plan based on the idea that no one ever called those Iowa farmers anyway.

I think we'll start seing a bunch of asterixes and footnotes on LD service plans regarding calls to Iowa.

Is http://www.yak4ever.com/ an example of that? I was hoping they would offer something similar in my country. Guess not...

Iowa system applies to calls originating in the US only. So this system benefits the company only if the calls are made from within the USA. All calls outside US do not attract surcharges. So, an international sim with an Iowa number is not possible....

Also most of these companies were shut down (from AT&T I think)

I believe it is. This is similar to some of the schemes/systems I've seen in Europe where you use your included mobile minutes to call a premium-rate access number which then gives you "free" international calling. One thing to keep in mind is that all these services live on a regulatory razor's edge caused by a quirk or loophole in the regulations. They can be shut down in a nonce if they become too much of a bother to the big companies who own the politicians.

[QUOTE=DRNewcomb;16633]I believe it is. This is similar to some of the schemes/systems I've seen in Europe where you use your included mobile minutes to call a premium-rate access number which then gives you "free" international calling. QUOTE]


I guess the people using this service don't mind paying high fees for the access number especially according to this blog i just saw on blog.roam4free.ie regarding yak4ever

"Yak4ever hits its first million minute week"

This is pretty impressive even though we knew it was coming, Yak4ever terminated 1 million minutes in the last 7 days.
We are thrilled with the progress the site is making and top destinations are China, Israel (thanks for the initial plug Jeff) UK (cheers Ewan) and Thailand
Whilst I totally agree with Moshe on the future of free calls and the customers expectations of free call being derisory to the industry, I am nevertheless over the moon with this as it took months and months of hard work to get it back up.
Hopefully we can keep this growing and out of the deadpool.

Thanks for the link. So, if I understand correctly, the whole Iowa tariff "mess" is caused by the fact that in sparsely populated rural areas the costs of creating the telecom infrastructure (mainly cables, I think) per subscriber are very high, while the expected revenues aren't.

Going back to the subject of the thread - why are international SIMs are "home-based" in small European countries. Of course, the fact they are often a kind of "tax paradises" may play some role but the main reason is that their telecom companies have "no room" to grow on local markets. I suppose that there is similar reason for which GSM-on-ships services are also often provided by companies from small countries (and at least in two cases are the same companies which provide roaming agreements for international SIMs).

I checked roaming partners list of the Polish mobile operators looking for GSM-onships roamings and I found the following

Large countries based
MCP - Norway (an operator "specialised" in "on-ships" roaming)
TIM - Italy
ATT - USA

Small countries based
OceanCell - Landsimmin Iceland
Seanet - Vodafone Malta
P&T Luxembourg
Jersey Telecom
Manx Telecom

Perhaps someone of you knows more examples.