It just remains to be seen if the US<->EU travelers attracted by this offer will compensate for the EU<->EU customers aggravated by the .29 EUR connection charge. That is if the +1 offer is good compared to other US prepaids to start with. For me for now all UM offers are quite pointless but I don't travel so often and so far.

My objection to celtrek (and Maxroam) is they charge you for calls that are not completed........which is also something we will have to watch out for in the UM offer.

Good point (although I think the set up fee is 0,19€, not 0,29€...

Also, perhaps if there is some competition, AT&T and T Mobile USA might consider lowering their asininely high unreasonable international roaming rates (and of course it bugs me big time when I have to pay this international roaming fee on a T Mobile US call when I'm roaming on T Mobile UK (or any other T Mobile owned carrier)...supposedly a big part of this international roaming fee is to reimburse the roaming partner for using its network...in other words T Mobile USA is reimbursing T Mobile UK....that's akin to me taking money from my left pocket and putting it in my right pocket (of course on the way it goes into somebody else's pocket me to pick up some lots of extra cash) and please don't try to tell me they are separate companies. At the end of the day, its Deutsch Telcom one way or the other.

Yes. they do. They charge you for at least 1 min as soon as you answer the callback. Regardless of the number you called. You can call a totally invalid number that never existed or has been dead for god knows how long. You still get charged.

The roaming charges are partially correct, there is signaling data and potentially voice going to/from overseas even if you call UK-UK with your US mobile while in UK so from the technical standpoint it's not just accounting betweek T-Mobile UK and T-Mobile US. That they could make a profit for a fraction of the price is another discussion.
In any case I don't see THIS making any dent in their bottom line. It might help without your personal bill a bit but a juggernaut like T-Mobile won't care about UM and the like which we have to admit are little more than "apartment companies". And to make things worse UM isn't a good long-term solution for any given place with all the incoming fees/expensive numbers. So you won't be really able to use the UM number as your main number and in effect any UM-based solution would have the added disadvantage of lost convenience.

It's fairly unlikely to be intended mainly as a long-term solution for people in only one given place

It's quite possible to use this without telling others the number.

For some UK and all US contract users (particularly those of the latter who haven't arranged cheap forwarding to existing global SIMs) it would come out of inclusive minutes.

Also, for users anywhere who can achieve cheap (e.g. 0 or 2 cent) forwarding to USA it could be quite interesting, achieving close to the Eurotariff in other countries as well, with the added bonus of a landline rather than mobile number for people at home to call it on. Yes, they could instead set up forwarding to a set of local SIMs, but one is simpler than many

Some more information to this card:

It has two IMSI numbers to be switched.
IMSI #1 is from a US carrier and it works on AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. This IMSI does not work outside the US.
IMSI #2 is the +44 carrier from jersey telecom.
So you have to switch to IMSI #1 when you are in the US.
Both numbers can be reached all the time anyway.

The tariff says in Zone 1 + 2 incoming calls are free with +44, 19ct/min with +1 - 19ct setup fee occur all the time.

Henning is testing this card for some time already now and he said it works stable. his full post in german here: Der United-Mobile Thread - Telefon-Treff


Chris

This could be very appealing for users of Canadian MVNOs like SpeakOut and Petro Canada Mobile. These MVNOs use the Rogers Canada GSM network but they cannot roam in the US. Also the standard phones they sell are unlocked.

So Canadians who want to be able to use their SO/PCM phone in the US could use the new UM+ SIM instead of buying a T-Mobile or AT&T SIM. Even though UM's airtime is more expensive there is no need to buy at least $100 of airtime from T-Mobile in order to keep a US SIM and phone number alive for 365 days. They would also be able to use that UM+ SIM outside of North America providing they have a quadband phone.

This development is certainly appealing for me because I already have a UM+ account and I don't travel to the US often enough to justify buying a separate T-Mobile SIM.

Would be nice if UM allowed us switching to 44/1 while keeping our existing Jersey numbers. However existing UM+ SIMs can definitely not be soft-switched to the 44/1 service, since that requires special SIM cards, that support multiple IMSIs.

US market probably NOT large
 

PERSONALLY, I am luke warm on the idea for the US market.

1. Most US travelers, business and private, already have a POSTPAID service as their main phone (like me and MOST people I know).

2. I doubt they are willing to part with these plans and their carriers.

3. Even Verizon apparently offers RENTED phones for international travel or crackberries with GMS capability.

4. Some few have foreign SIM cards, but not many.

5. The question would be whether or not someone would be willing to ADD a service like this FOR FOREIGN TRAVEL.

6. I already have several gold reward SIMs I can loan out to anyone who visits us. We have not had German visitors in quite some years, however.

Again, PERSONALLY, I am unsure I would be willing to invest another - say $25 - in a new UM dual 44/1 SIM. The 1 portion of the card is basically worthless to me EXCEPT when I or one of my family would be traveling overseas. I would be able to reach the traveling family member or be reached by others in US at a lower cost than dialing the +44 or one of my other SIMs.

Now, if they offered a FREE or lowcost conversion, that would be different.

As I have written elsewhere, I will eventually need to decide whether I recharge or not. At this time I am leaning to refrain from adding any money to my +UM card.

I would ask our German friends -- UM is promising, has promised for some time to come up with a dual SIM for 49 -- would you be willing to ADD another SIM? Would you be willing to take on this one as your main SIM?

Stan