TheMadBrewer, what are their rates for forwarding to UK mobile? The only thing I saw there is that there will be an additional small fee for forwarding to mobiles. May be I was looking at the wrong place.

Rates are 13 to 16? depending on which cel carrier you are calling. To find the rates, go to "plans". The bottom of the 3 in the drop down menu is: Intl rates.

...mike

What is strange about their pricing is that the rates charged to "basic" users is 10 to 15% cheaper than what full plan payers are charged for intl. calls.

Where can we find info about their virtual calling card;

I caught thta as well. I don't seem to being surcharged on these calls. They charged me 16 cents a minute on a test call I placed to an IOM SIM.

By the way, voipcheap.com has a $0.07 a minute routing to UK mobiles. This is a seperate program from voipcheap.co.uk by the way. I think they are both Finerra companies. There has been a lot of people saying that Finerra did something in the last day or two to interfere with Asterisks servers connect to their accounts. The company has good rates, but some screwy business practices. Their rates also move around quite a bit.

Stu

As much as I hated to leave the home of sushi and udon, I'm back in the USA now. Even though I was not using a global prepaid SIM in Japan (my grandfathered T-Mobile roaming rates in Japan are very good) I did make a lot of use of my VoiceStick account. When I was in a place where I had a direct landline I could forward my T-Mobile cell phone to the VoiceStick number which I had set to forward to the landline. Turned out to be around 2 or 3 US cents per minute. When I was in places where I had some e-mail but no direct inward dailing (Some calls had to go through multiple dialing stages, if they were working at all) I just turned on the Voicemail to E-mail feature. In a hotel with free WiFi I used the VOIP service to make calls at 2c/min. It saved me a huge amount of money.

For those of you that are using voicestick, did you have to have an funds in your account in order to be able to do the forwarding?

Yeah, I set up my Voicestick with about $10 a few months ago. Looks like that $10 may last a long time.

Don,

Do you have any way to figure out old T-Mobile Roaming rates other than hit and miss. They took those rates off the website. Now, customer services seems unable to find them.

Stu

At various time I had written some down in various places. I plan on collecting the scraps of paper together into a spreadsheet, but at this point I have nothing organized.

I have been able to get my old T-M intl. roaming rates via email. Last time i did this was May 3rd. Here is what i got from them concerning Panama. (Never did get there. Got to about 75 miles from the border w. Costa Rica.)

=====
Here is the international roam rate if you were roaming on Telefonica Moviles Panama:

Local Calls - Peak: $0.70 per Minute
Local Calls - Off-Peak: $0.70 per Minute
Calls To US - Peak: $1.72 per Minute
Calls To US - Off-Peak: $1.72 per Minute
Incoming Call Rate: $0.00 per Minute
Calls to other countries: $0.99 - $8.99 per minute.

Here is the international roam rate if you were roaming on Cable & Wireless Panama:

Local Calls - Peak: $1.43 per Minute
Local Calls - Off-Peak: $1.43 per Minute
Calls To US - Peak: $2.20 per Minute
Calls To US - Off-Peak: $2.20 per Minute
Incoming Call Rate: $1.83 per Minute
Calls to other countries: $0.99 - $8.99 per minute.

The rates listed above are in U.S. Dollars ($) per minute
and are subject to change without prior notice.

Upon further review, I notice that you have been with us since October, 9th 2004 and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for being a loyal T-Mobile customer.
=====

Note 2 things. I was w. Omnipoint/Voicestream/T-M since mid 90's. The 2004 date is approx. when they started operations here in Ca. and i could make T-M my primary carrier w. a local number.

AND they say there is ZERO charge for incoming in Panama. I emailed them bacck to verify this, and they did. (Panama is 850 only.)

I have never tried getting rates fm. CS via phone.

...mike