The first local DID has no maintenance fee. Any additional ones do have a fee. Can't remember what it is. But, if you go to their website and choose to add an additional DID to your sim, it will let you know the monthly charge.

09 in Switzerland
 

Hi, just wanted to clarify the Switzerland question.

09 has some technical arrangements with the Swiss operators that would not be possible if roaming was also allowed in Switzerland - this is an industry wide problem in the prepaid roaming world, it just happens that in 09's case it's Switzerland which is unfortunate, but without going into any technical details, it also means that 09 and it's partners support 190 roaming countries with considerably more reliability than otherwise.

It's the 'technical arrangements' that we're interested in :-)
I don't understand why not making a roaming agreement with one operator would result in a more reliable situation?

Maybe it has something to do with privacy (like their 'banking secrecy' - don't know if that's translated well)... ?

Generically speaking, mobile operators sometimes exchange roaming agreements amongst themselves, when this happens they have to deny access in their own networks due to the subscriber then appearing to them as a local subscriber, which they don't have any record of, on the other hand the same subscriber gains access to many countries that would not make commercial sense for their operator to do direct agreements with.

Sorry..I'm dense...are you saying that, generically speaking of course, in order not to have sit around and make roaming agreements with 190 different operators, you make roaming arrangements with a few and receive the roaming arrangements they have but in the process you have to sacrifice the ability of your own subscribers to roam in that country so that by, generically speaking of course, O9 had to make an agreement say with Swiss operators that in order to dig into their data base of roaming partners, they had to agree that their own subscribers could not roam there.

Makes no sense to me...it doesn't seem as if this "problem" has occurred with any of the Estonian, Liectenstein, Isle of Man (when they were living of course) or Jersey operators.

I think this is justifiable if 09 is using swiscom roaming agreements.

UM uses mobilkom roaming agreements. The situation is more clear there. It is an MVNO of Mobilkom

Swisscom, however, has (or had) a roaming brokerage service where it acted as a roaming consolidator to smaller operators.

Hi Matha531,

I think it's probably more a case of the ability of smaller operators to do such a large amount of roaming agreements, seeing as most smaller operators throughout the world do roaming access agreements that operate similarly, 09 Mobile isn't an MVNO, and is AFAIK the only international prepaid roaming provider that operates it's own network, and I think that 09's network might have the best worldwide network coverage available on an international prepaid SIM even though there is unfortunately no coverage yet in Switzerland.

Of course this also extends to Yackie Mobile who's new SIM card is the subject of this thread, their product looks very professional and polished.

Earlier in this thread, Yackie wrote that they do terminate (some, not all) of their connections, themselfs. So, if that's true, they should be able to make Switserland available, if they can make some agreements with the Swiss Mobile Operators, AND they are allowed to terminate to countries that their supplier isn't allowed to terminate to.

Yeah, I think their new offer is reliable and a good service overall, even if maybe not the cheapest...