Hello,

dialling the +423 663 099 911 gives interesting information (announcement).
On United Mobile - Low rates for calls and internet abroad you can subscribe for a newsletter.
I'll put the SIM-card in my cupboard and will wait for the time to come.

Meanwhile I use my Swisscom NATEL Easy. Not the cheapest one, but quality.

Yep! Sim cannot register. Phone displaying "Invalid Sim" I hope this is not sign of trouble for UM. On second thoughts, their website being down may actually mean more than I originally thought.

The 423 or the 44?

Can anyone on the forum actually make a UM call !

Due to the last news, which have been published. BOTH platforms are now switched off.

They "try to offer the service again" ..., what this means exactly will show the near future.

So let's cut to the chase...

1. My UM+44 gives the fatal sim card registration failed message which usually coincides with a dead account (that was my first indication O9 had kicked the bucket). So is it in a deep coma from which it can emerge or has UM+ expired?

2. My ekit passport (which had both a +423 and a +44, I have the +44) does register and as a matter of fact, I was able to call into it (didn't answer of course) but cannot call out to get an account balance. Trying to get an account balance gives the message (on the roaming partner, in this case T Mobile US) that calls on this line are not allowed and to call customer service at 611. Is it affected by all this (or in other words does it have a relationship with UM as it used +423 and is now using +44)?

It's too bad because I did think UM was, of all the international cards, pretty stable. So what is the consensus here....are we stuck with Mr. Ed and his people? Will ekit survive?

Or is the concept of cheap (and free of course) international roaming a thing of the past to join well let's see Ryanair, hop, riiing (which was the name before United Mobile changed its name), O9?????

Matha531, is UM gone, don't know but they have problems and they were stable but now seem to be fallen.

During the years many have fallen so one can only conclude that this is a difficult market to stay alive.

I have a travelsim.co.uk card, works fine, bought that when um changed their rates a few month ago. Hope these card will work for a longer time but we will see.
+423 was dead anyhow because of high rates calling the number. +44 is still my ideal platform as calling these numbers is cheap using voip. Iceland mobile and some of the otherone were difficult to call anyhow or were twice as expensive to call.

Hello!
But what is happening at United Mobile? Is failing?

Nobody knows what happened so far. But as all this happened very suddenly I presume, that UM have either run out of cash and couldn't settle their bills or maybe their employees left the company or both.

Yikes- I hope transferring my balance from my +423 to my +44 didn't push them over the edge! ;)

Gosh, now I wish I had taken pictures of my visit to UM. Who would have thought it would be their last day! (Hoping of course that isn't the case.)

Oh well, at least I had a nice balance on my +44 for almost a day. ;(

Kupe

Wow- the sharks waste no time:

I don't know anything about "Onesimcard", but a link to this was on Howard Forums:
OneSIMcard welcomes United Mobile customers - International SIM Card, Prepaid SIM cards, International Mobile phones, rent a cell phone for international travel, International Cell Phones, Global Phone SIM Card, corporate mobile phones

It also appears if you Google "United Mobile Replacement" and the page says "Got Burned With Your United Mobile SIM Card Not Working Anymore?..."

FWIW, they use an Estonia number so I wonder if they are another rebranded version of TravelSim?



Kupe

@kupe
I'm sorry. After all your historic trip, which made a contemporary witness of you, makes absolutely sense to me. You were probably the last man to have seen United Mobile alive.
For now UM hasn't filed bankruptcy neither in Liechtenstein nor for their Swiss branch (search for "United Mobile" and check "Laufendes Jahr").

For example, if United Mobile closed what do his customers?

PS: Sorry for my English, but I am using a translator. ;)

If you are asking what will happen to their customers if UM goes out of business, which it looks like they have at least for now, probably nothing. It's very unlikely that any credit will be refunded if this shutdown is due to financial reasons. Most folks (at least I do) probably just write whatever credit off as part of doing business. I try to not topup any of these sims unlesas I really need to. So as to minimize my loss in a situation like this.

It can not happen, for example, that another company acquires United Mobile customers if it were to close?

Unlikely. After they are bankrupt, somebody else might only buy their customer data, which we can't delete anymore, and could offer us some replacement.

Ok, we'll see what happens. :rolleyes:

Hello there,

there are too many questions what happened.

Did UM leave the (Mobilkom) Liechtenstein Plattform on its own decision or has the Austrian Headquarter of Mobilkom lost its personal interest in creative roaming-tariffs, as the by the European Union down-regulated roaming-tariffs reduce the possible margins in this business?

Why did Jersey Telecom switch off their system suddenly, without any notification? If a system is switched off, normally an announcement informs the callers, like "We are sorry, we cannot connect the desired call" or something like this.

Too many questions.

Why were the UM online Shop and the personal account closed so suddenly?

Why is there no official statement on their Homepage?

The regular customer sits at home and does not discuss this questions. He wants to make calls either a lowest prices or at maximum quality or stability. If he paid money, he wants to know, if this money is gone or will come back.

I think, there is still a chance that UM will come back some day. But it will be a very hard task to regain the trust of their long year customers.

Business is not always so cute as a love-movie in the cinema, but some customer information even when there is trouble ahead is crucial for trust of customers in "their" company.

To speak it clearly:

For European customers the "damage" is not so hard - as the current Roaming-Regulations give interesting prices to customers roaming inside the EU.

For international customers or people who want to make phonecalls from or to non (EU) European destinations the alternatives are very rare and nothing than reliable.

Isle of Man (IoM): Switching-Cabin "Callkey" switched off suddenly and the customers had to suffer and to wait. OK, they came back, but many customers didn't return.
Isle of Man is used by various companies like GT-SIM , Globalsim and others.

Jersey Island: Was first discovered by United-Mobile (UM+) the Voice-Mail-System is located in Germany. UM used the prefix +44-7937, which is completely shut down.

At the moment Jersey is also used by Sim4Travel (AKA Truphone) which hijacked the domain Avoid United Mobile problems with a free SIM upgrade from SIM4travel and which uses a +44-7509 prefix. Are the switchboards of UM and S4T located in the same City, the same house, on the same floor? Could a technician have changed some cables in error? Not for such a long time.

Iceland was used by 09.is It is gone, due to the economical crisis.

Some offers tried Israel (+971) SIM Cards, it didn't work as some customers exspected.

There are cards based in Estonia (+372). Calling this number from various countries suffers similar problems as calling +423-663.

On new offer is located in Belgium (intra EU). Have no personal experience with it yet. (Using +32-486 Prefix)

Weird enough: +423-663 Platform is still up and running. May be it was a mistake to shift all the money from +423 to +44

My personal crystal ball says: +423 will come back :-)
This my personal crystal ball. I have no proven facts on this opinion. Time will tell, if I were right :-)

If some service is switched of suddenly, it indicates that bills were not paid. Also, the so called "legal dispute" with Mobilkom.at (re +423) is rather about money, I assume. Seemingly both Mobilkom.at and Jersey Telecom lost faith in UM's ability to pay their bills, while the rest of the (most likely sceptical) UM workforce was looking for some other opportunity. The workforce and the customers are the last to know about the severity or imminence of a crisis.

RIP UM

Ahhh- so was Jersey Telecom the cause of this latest outage then? Very interesting. Why indeed??

OMG that is so sleazy! Like I said, the sharks wasted no time!

Oh no! After all I went through to get my balance moved to my +44, now I have to go back to Zurich to get it moved back to my +423! ;)

Very interesting post Henny! Thank you!

Kupe

Hi Kupe,

To make it clear: Um423 allows only incoming calls, no outgoing, no Textmeassages (SMS) no Data at this time.

OT: Henning is a nordic form of Henry

As I said on another thread, some of the speculation is unsafe or even incorrect in some details, and I'll express that reservation here too.

When another range of SIMs went offline, even after considerable pessimism here they came back. And in the meantime other offers emerged. Yes, these things have been volatile, but what seems for a while to be fatal needn't be.

Other phone companies have had outages or account access problems without always indicating the same thing, some even this week.

And as Henning points out, the +423663 SIMs aren't dead yet, despite predictions. And as well as that, reaching them from some cheap calls providers has been more reliable recently than the previous 4 years.

I believe that MAXRoam does actually work, and it's rates are not too bad. You get a Belgium number, and the promise, for what its worth, that numbers from other countries will be available soon.

Not registering in USA either
 

fyi, cannot roam here now with UM 44

(not that I did so other than to send the validating sms every nine months...)

Seems a sign of collapse (?) as it would have been very easy to say "we're switching networks, Jersey is down, etc" rather than these non-specific messages on the web and elsewhere.

Cheers.

It's not just the SIMs, which went offline, but our accounts, too. UM is switched off, with both ranges. That the 423 lines are still connected, while pretty useless, is beyond UMs control.

Even if the speculations are "unsafe", such unannounced total closures of service are typical of bankruptcies. In any other case they could have informed the customers in timely manner. They do have our email addresses, after all.

I was so close to buy from UM SIM cards as back up. After the Callkey disaster in 2007 I was looking for a reliable solution and first I switched to YackieMobile but the issue with Yackie was the reachability. Then I switched to S4T and I have no problems since I have it.

It looks like a lottery game since 2007, which provider will be the next going down.

Theoretically we can try to find financial statement of each provider.

I found in google:

About travelsim:
Translated version of http://www.arileht.ee/artikkel/454872
So travelsim had turnover
21 mln eur in year 2007
42 mln eur in year 2008

About Sim4Travel
http://www.plusmarketsgroup.com/cgi-...travel2008.pdf
So Sim4travel had turnover
1,3 mln eur in year 2007
1,9 mln eur in year 2008

About MaxRoam
Mobile | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | guardian.co.uk
they plan to be profitable in 2009 with 25000 customers
unfortinately no any financial statement found
but it can be around 1 mln eur turnover in 2008
(if calculate with average ARPU)

About United mobile
United Mobile - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
unfortinately no any financial statement found

So, you can choose your favorite provider...

Revenue doesn't indicate the stability of an enterprise at all. Earnings/losses and leverage level are the relevant key figures. But even the financially most sound company may be forced to stop service, if contracts with the MVNE are cancelled or not prolonged.

most probably it can happens with bancrupt MVNO,

so if somebody can get actiual balances of these companies then possible to make more accurate prediction.

Is Sim4Travel working right now? Curious since they also use Jersey Telecom.

Kupe

@kupe

S4T is working without any problems, at the moment.

The issue is not with Jersey Telecom, their system is running flawlessly. I think they just switched off the number range which was granted to UM.

Hello everybody.

Newbie here.

My United-Mobile SIM (+44) stopped working in Sweden on April 16.

Is there something wrong with them?

Hello & welcome. Please read this thread you are posting in, the answers and assumptions are all here.

Hi. I've just received from UM customer service following email. Old news but fresh email... the looks stile alive, let us see...

-----------------
Dear Customer:

Thank you for contacting us.

Customer complaints in the last few weeks have dramatically increased regarding the reliability of the +423 SIM card.
We have undertaken massive efforts to solve the problem but were unable to do so.

Due to this problem and the involved legal dispute our partner Mobilkom has notified us that the +423 platform will be switched off shortly.

In addition, since 04/15/2009 we are suffering from a complete outage of the +44 platform. We are working on a solution of this problem with all our effort.

If you wish to receive a free +44 SIM as a replacement for your +423 SIM card please update your “my account” on United Mobile - Low rates for calls and internet abroad so we are able to send you a new +44 SIM-card for free.

Existing call value can be migrated by our customer service from +423 to +44 SIMs.

Best regards,

Customer Service
United Mobile

Apologies.
I acted as a newbie...
Read everything... I do not desparately need a (almost) roaming cost free SIM, however some people from the UK use this number.

Wow, bummer I was just about to use my +44 card for a europe trip in the coming weeks. Anyone know about getting into accounts, my concern is now around CC data on their systems.

Well I wouldn't say I'm necessarily all that optimistic; however didn't many of the Isle of Man sim cards come back from the dead a couple of years ago? Does sound like a funding problem, don't you agree.

I am in Germany and I can confirm that both United Mobile SIM card (+44 and +423) does not working anymore. The company is obviously out of business.

Probably there is a way to communicate with United Mobile’s management, since the customer service is not answering anymore and the website functions are off.

In his Linkedin.com profile Alexander Trommen still proudly confirms: “I am currently Chief Marketing Officer of United Mobile AG, the leading MVNO targeting the international business traveller segment with over 300,000 customers in 80 countries.”

This means that if you are a Linkedin member and you are one of the 300,000 customers abandoned by United Mobile, you can write to Alexander Trommen directly asking for clarifications.

The same applies to Sven Donhuysen. His Linkedin profile still defines his current job as “President at United Mobile AG”.

There is a much more easier way to get in touch with them (if they answer the phone). Searching the public Swiss phonebook gives you this result:

Firmeneintrag vCard WebStamp SBB Speichern Ändern

United Mobile AG
Schaanwald Kloten Branch
Obstgartenstrasse 27
8302 Kloten/ZH
+41 43 204 28 28.

After having contact with them last week on wednesday, they assured me to shift my balance from my ICQ Sim to a +44 UM SIM that will be posted to me. One day later they had the service outage of +44 platform as well. Tried to call them and got an answering service telling that all platforms are down at the moment and they will fix it as soon as possible. When calling later that day, the message were switched to "you are calling us out of our business hours".

I tried right now to call again and it says "all our lines are busy at the moment, please wait" and you get disconnected after about 3 minutes or so. There IS someone at the office, regardless if they went out of business or not.

By the way, I have ordered on of those SIM4travel replacement cards that are offered for free, and they did arrive within 3 working days within europe. Altough they are not really free! They state on the website AND the bill enclosed Free SIM and free postage, but charge 6.someting Pound for shipping 2 free SIMcard by registerred mail.

Greetings, BK

PS: Funny enough, I were on the local Swiss Post office on Friday and they still sold United-Mobile SIMcards. I've asked the clerk about any news updates and he told me, there has been an information about service problems of +423 on wednesday. :chair:

@burbonkiller

... please correct me if I am wrong, BUT I don´t see anywhere that the shipping within Europe is free?!

The shipping within the UK is free as stated.