What is annoying to me is that if the UK jaws my local country, I get EU roaming rates capped by the EU's roaming regs, but with the US as my home country, the rates are considerably higher.

Well, according to Truphone's answer in this thread the US european pricing is incorrect.

Just to wrap up a "moan" I started earlier in this thread :) I got the nicest reply from Tru, and they transferred the $15 without a hassle... also they found out why I could not top up. All is well again :D

This is what they wrote:

I live in the U.S. and I'm thinking about using Tru for my cell phone service here. I expect everything will be alright if I can get good cell tower reception throughout the country, as Tru promises, and if they don't raise their US-to-US calling rates. I plan on keeping the same phone number I currently have when I leave AT&T very soon.

Anyone else in the U.S. using Tru full-time? If so, have you been satisfied? Thanks.

I use it often and works anywhere where there is T-Mobile coverage which is pretty much everywhere I go. They are definitely one of the best offers on prepaid if you live in the US.

SIM Magic
 

Remember that they use T-Mobile, so if T-Mobile is good coverage for you, than Tru can be.

And now to my topic. When I turned on my phone today, it said, "Welcome to Tru", not "Welcome to Truphone" like it used to. Also, On the screen when it shows network as T-Mobile, underneath it now says Tru and not Truphone.

Austalia back, but
 

In an email I received today, Tru indicated [and the website verifies] that Australia is now available as a membership rate country and phones numbers are available. The 'BUT'? An Austalian phone number at this point cannot be a primary number. You have to add it to your US or UK phone number.

A step forward, at least.

How much do they charge for a virtual number? My best friend is an American ex-pat living in London who will be moving to Australia in the fall of 2011. It is almost as if they designed the product for him.

Well...........
 

That is the easy question to answer:Does he need a US & a UK number? $8/month each [once tru perfects an austalian primary number]. And the memberhip rate for the non-home countries is $15/month.

If cost is not an issue, than the product seems to be the optimum for him. If he stays in Australia most of the time, he would only need the membership rates when he traveled. I would think, that the inspired could find US & UK forwarding numbers that would be more economical. But this could be for the non-prepaidgsm.net types who want a minimum of hassle.

Mark is a technophobe who thinks I make things too complicated and mocks me about the number of SIM chips I have. Living in the UK, however, has taught him the value of being parsimonious.

He has a hard time keeping one alive and unlike his teenage son and wife, he rarely uses the phone. As he is taking charge of the family's migration project, however, he is coming to the US with his son for a month and a half this summer to get him a US driver's license and finalize his US citizenship. He is then going for two weeks to France (their rates match EU prepaid SIM rates there), and then going to OZ to help set up their new home, and then returning to England to pack up the UK house.

I don't know that he should give Truphone $15 a month forever, but I think that June through October may be a good bet for him to be reached in one place worldwide without having to deal with callbacks, etc.

I was thinking that he should get an OZ number, pay the $15. I can give him a US number and a UK number (UK DDI). I have a source for Michigan DIDs. One of my clients is a small Michigan VOIP service and they give me as many DIDs as I want. Once he is in OZ for good, stop paying the $15 and use the phone as his local phone. He is the perfect candidate for prepaid and a few cents more than a local SIM isn't going to matter for his light usage.

My roaming SIMs have gravitated to Ekit and Maxroam (buying a US virtual number). I now have an iPhone with ATT's unlimited worldwide data which gives me free VOIP over 3g, a great callback trigger device, and the ability to forward my DID on the fly to the prepaid SIM de jour. I effectively have 8 US cents a minute calling everywhere in most of Western Europe, OZ, etc. I'm paying only US$0.10 a minute in the Bahamas!

I then loan my roaming SIMs to friends who wind up making enough outbound calls ib tgen that even the roaming SIM companies do well off me. I'm down to a UAE and a UK prepaid SIM and will probably ditch the UK one when I run out of money, but the free Skype calls <=> my Asterisks box make it tempting.