telna Mobile [split thread]
 

Hi

My name is Herve and I work at telna Mobile. We just launched a new international roaming service that looks like all the ones you are mentioning in this post. It took us many years to work on it as we didn't want a service that would go down as quickly as many others you mentioned in this thread.

The reason I post in this thread is that we decided to waive our first year of annual fees for former celtrek customers as long as they still have the celtrek SIM card. The reason is that we would be able to switch those cards onto our network and make them work with our equipments. Our company would save, so we share the savings.

Our service is not prepaid, it is postpaid. But at this time we only sell it to customers in the US (sorry for the others).

You can check our website at telna Mobile - Low cost cellular service for international travelers(reduced roaming for inbound and outbound calls while abroad)

I'll keep an eye on the forum for your questions.

Thanks for looking!

Hi

All our SIM cards are provided with a US DID since we are first targetting the US market. All the rates displayed on our website include the cost of a US DID.

Thanks!

Website not loading.

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Bossman, can you tell me what browser/OS you are using?
I can access this website with IE 7, Firefox 3 and Chrome 2

I am using IE 6 on windows XP prof. Not a big deal. Was just gonna check it out.

Bossman,

thanks for letting me know. The bug with IE6 is fixed. You should be able to check the website.

I wish Telnamobile was making the first year free offer for holders of the defunct Maxroam and/or the Yackie SIM.

Hi

We gave it some thought and decided to expand the offer to all customers of other services listed on this page: PrePaidGSM.net: International GSM Operators

We have decided to create a competitive upgrade program where we provide you a free telna Mobile SIM card and waive the annual fee in the first year, in exchange for sending in your old card.

The way it would work is that you sign up on our website telna Mobile - Low cost cellular service for international travelers(reduced roaming for inbound and outbound calls while abroad) like a regular customer. Then you need to contact our customer service either by phone at 1-800-972-7538 or by email at info@telna.com and let us know that you would like to upgrade your old SIM card to telna Mobile. Then you need to send your old SIM card to: Telecom North America Inc
Attn: telna Mobile Upgrade Offer
2654 W Horizon Ridge Pkwy
Ste B5-143
Henderson, NV 89052

Please write down your name and address and a telephone number so we match your telna Mobile application. Once we receive your SIM card, we will smail your new telna Mobile SIM card and we will NOT charge the first year of annual fee, so the card will be entirely free of charge. We hope this will help a few people. We're working on adding a prepaid version of the service later on for non USA residents.

In the meantime if someone from outside USA is interested in our service, please PM me and we can figure something out. We're still building the non-USA offer and would be interested in hearing about the requirements of international customers. For example would you prefer a local Italian, French or German landline number for your SIM, that does not support inbound SMS, or would you prefer a USA number that will support inbound SMS?

Thank you! That's very decent of you. Looking forward to trying your service.

Telna... I looked at your application.... How do I keep you from billing the $49 up front after filling out the application? Is there a code I can put in the application which means "waiting for SIM?" or something? Or will customer service be able to stop the billing immediately based on an email or a phone call?

You can submit the application and once it's here, you need to either call our customer service (1-800-972-7538) or email us at info@telna.com .

We don't charge when you submit the application, we only charge when we process it. And if you call and let us know you want to use our upgrade offer, then we'll make sure you don't get charged.

Worst case: my name is Herve, so you can find me for anything.

That sounds very interesting indeed.
I think that many people here would be OK with a US number. The cards with seperate numbers for voice and SMS are quite difficult to explain and calls to US are less than 1ct/min here...

Chris

Which Celtrek SIM card? #1, #2 or #3?

If you have a celltrek card, when you can contact our customer service after your application you can let us know the simcard serial number written on the card (ICCID) and we'll find out if we can reactivate the card in our network.

If not you can always send it back to us and we'll upgrade it to a telna Mobile card without charging the first annual fee.

Thanks!

That sounds like a good deal.

One thing you probably should know. When you offer your services here, it's like offering to stick your head in the lion's mouth. Our members can be very tough when a provider does not live up to his promises.

DRNewcomb,

We actually understood this would be the case from the posts in this forum and that's why we decided to make this special offer here.

Our Mobile service just started, it is still in beta, but we work very hard on making it as good as possible.

We believe the feedback from users of this forum would be the best thing we can receive as apparently everyone here has had experiences with 2-3 (or more) SIM providers.

Plus we have years of experience providing the best customer service possible to our customers and we always try to resolve any issue that can be met.

We certainly hope you won't need to look for a new SIM provider after you use the telna Mobile service.

Thanks for giving us a chance.

Questions about telna Mobile
 

Hi

I'm starting this thread for any questions regarding the telna Mobile service.

In short telna Mobile provides a postpaid roaming service with American numbers for US customers. The service was launched in beta this week.

The website is http://www.telnamobile.com

If you have questions or troubles with the service, feel free to post here, and we'll keep an eye and try to make sure all questions are answered.

Thanks!

Hi,

Which MNO is your service based on?

Regarding your question on what DID people would prefer, I would appreciate if I could hand over calls to your service by SIP.
So you would provide me a SIP-URI like 1234567890@telnamobile.com and I could forward incoming calls to my German DIDs to you by myself, which would be very flexible and save costs.
Providing German (no matter if geographical or non-geographical) numbers would be quite a problem for you, as such may only be assigned to residents and you will be required to validate residency of each customer, which means high administrative effort besides the costs for the rental of DIDs. Afaik your parent company 3U Telecom owns only number blocks in few cities.

regards,

Inquisitor

I agree that an inbound SIP portal woud be a Good Thing®. It may be a bit techincal for the average user but we aren't average users.

I'd also like to know where the available inbound US numbers are located.

Like the European-based SIMs, the costs for North America (incl Canada and Mexico) are VERY high. So presumably this is a US DID, forwarded to a global SIM service from another country?

For US people travelling to Europe it looks like a OK deal (if they don't mind an annual fee, and revealing their SSN), especially since they can forward their US cellphone to the domestic number. But for travelling from the US to neighbouring countries (the majority of US international travellers) it works out worse than roaming (even prepaid roaming!) in most cases.

Not being able to send/receive a text would be a deal-killer for some, and is often the hardest thing to get working on a forwarded number, so it'll be interesting to see when that (and data) will be available.

Hi

Because our company has been providing long distance services in the US since 2002 and we have our own network and direct relationship with dozens of the world largest carriers, as well as network equipment on 2 continents. The cellular carrier from whom we get the SIM cards doesn't have as much influence as in the case of the other providers we've seen on the market who were only reselling SIM cards without much influence on the technical handling of the calls, and without any other revenue stream to ensure their service would be there for many years.

To save you from decompiling the cards, I can tell you that the SIMs are coming from an Israeli mobile operators. This being said, that does not mean it will encounter the troubles of other cards from Israel as the technical setup is completely different. 100% of voice calls transit over our own network.

We could imagine this SIP option indeed where you would send the calls to yourtelnamobilenumber@sometelnaserver . Would you need a proxy to register into, and/or are you sending from a fixed IP address?

Currently we offer numbers in California, Florida and New York. We will add shortly Washington DC, Nevada, Illinois and Texas

We don't pretend to have better rates than everyone else for all countries and we know that roaming to Canada or Mexico for example is a weak point for our service at this time. However we offer free voicemail online, which means that if you travel in one of the expensive countries with our service and you have access to the internet, you can check your voicemails from our website.

We understand that the missing text messages can be a deal-killer. We're working on making sure our US numbers properly receive text messages before rolling out the text messages service.

Thanks for your offer. A couple of questions...

Does your service require any kind of mnimum service period? That is, am I free to cancel anytime without being dinged a fee or another $49 yearly fee. Also, how easy is it to cancel the service, just sed email, phone call?

The service doesn't have any monthly fee, cancellation fee, trick fees.
All we have is an annual $49 fee, that we charge on the anniversary date of the SIM card setup.

So if you cancel before 1 year, then you pay no yearly fee if you used our upgrade offer. All you pay for are the calls you made.

Sending an email could be OK, as long as you make sure that someone replies that we took care of it (I'm saying this since sometimes emails can get filtered out in spam folders) or a phone call to our customer service during business hours.

Unlike most providers listed, we have a real customer service with live persons available during business hours in the US. And this customer service also helps our customers for regular long distance in the US, our customers for dial around service in the US, so we're not going to just turn off the customer service number like some other providers.

Do you run your own MVNO registrar or do you piggyback on your provider's HLR? Running your own registrar would allow the call path to entirely bypass the Israeli operator's infrastructure thus reducing latency.

To be compatible with the SIP world out there you must allow anonymous/unauthenticated calls to the client's SIP URI.

Can you also send voicemails to a specified email address?

We piggyback the calls to our provider's HLR.

We will then work on making this option available. As long as you send yourtelnamobilenumber@sometelnaserver to one of our IPs we should be able to add this feature.

For the voicemails we already have the option of a notification of new voicemail or notification of voicemail with the voicemail attached (wav file).

The call would come as a SIP INVITE from any source/URI to yourtelnamobilenumber@sometelnaserver.

Voicemails would be best compressed with either .gsm (limited number of players) or low grade single channel mp3 (to make it compatible with most email enabled phones out there). I for one use 16kbps/mono cbr mp3 to encode voicemails before emailing them to their destination.

Yes, SIP would be very useful. It would make it possible to bypass a chain of providers - thus provide better quality at lower costs. It would also make it possible to use your SIM as an extension of IP-enabled PBXes.

It would be also useful to have a DID from my own country. That number should also sent as CID when calling out.

As for me, I do not really need SMS, but a nice feature would be to be able to send SMS as if they would come from my main home number. Receiving SMS is free in most countries I visit, so I would be able to send SMS from one card, and receive SMS on another.

Latency is a key issue in these international callback systems. I recommended Celtrek service to a friend as being cheaper than using a Japanese prepaid in Japan. It was. It worked just fine. His wife refused to talk on the phone because she could not get used to the latency. When talking to her relatives in Japan, while in Japan, the call had to go around the world and back again. This introduced such a delay she couldn't accomodate to it. (Most people don't have a half-duplex mode.) Had they been roaming normally, the delay wouldn't have been an issue.

SIP would be very handy indeed. I could be called directly from a PC or even smartphone at any WiFi hotspot. It would also be handy to have options to call voicemail via SIP and/or receive voicemail as an attachment to an e-mail. The latter was a feature of Celtrek's initial offering which I used frequently, as I would travel out of cellular service for long periods of time but still have good e-mail access. I could receive my voicemails and then either e-mail the caller back or return the call via satellite phone.

gsm files shouldn't be a problem. I added this to the roadmap of future additions. MP3 I don't think we'll add it because it requires licensing of the codec.

It's now on the road map.

Since the calls are going through our network, we already allow you to display whatever caller ID you like when making calls from your telna Mobile SIM card. We thought it could be useful for people who forward their American cellular phone when travelling and don't want to advertise a new additional number to their friends/family/partners.

This feature will be supported when we launch the SMS service.

As VladS said, we would just need a SIP-URI, to which we could forward, however in my case my IP-address would change every 24 hours, as most providers interrupt ADSL-connection once a day here in Germany and I would forward calls from my Fritz!Box Fon (a superb VoIP-ATA/PBX/DSL-router).

Against EU-regulated roaming rates your rates are also kind of weak. But of course since you assign landline numbers you don't have any termination income, which could subsidize inbound rates. On the one hand that makes incoming calls more expensive for your users, on the other hand that saves costs for callers and again for your users, if they forward calls (especially if we could forward calls for free via SIP).

What about data service? Will you offer such?

We'll do it without registration or anything. It's now on the roadmap.

Since our first market is the US, we didn't think it would make sense to offer number on the Isle of Man or Liechtenstein or Iceland where the outrageous rates for incoming calls sponsor the calls. That prevent us from offering free incoming calls like some other services, but at least it's easy for anyone to reach our numbers and we are building a long term business model that ensures the users know the real costs.

We'll add the data service shortly. We're working on making sure regular customers don't leave their data on at night downloading useless stuff and ending up with a few thousand dollars of data. From our experience that's the most common trouble.

What I would appreciate is SMS delivery by eMail or web and SMS forwarding. As I discussed recently with a GSM specialist, it should be possible to modify the HLR, so all SMS (including those from third-party networks) would be first delivered to some SMS-proxy. Depending on user preferences that SMS-proxy would then

1. deliver messages to the phone and/or
2. forward messages to another number (subject to charge) and/or
3. forward message to an eMail address and
4. show all sent and incoming messages on the web.

That would be a very innovative and convinient service, that would open a lot of new possibilites.

Another innovative service would be call delivery including parallel call by SIP, as Austria's A1 (A1 over IP) and Germany's solomo offer. So users could also receive calls for free if received by VoIP (VoIP and GSM would ring simultaneously). That of course will decrease your revenue at first sight, but users would of course use that VoIP-account also for their outgoing calls, which would bypass Israel and so a higher margin could be left for you.

I completely understand that. Anyway I wonder why there's no roaming discounter based on a MNO from the European Union, who would benefit from EU-regulated data wholesale tariffs.

That sounds well. Since your service is postpaid, I would appreciate if there was a configurable cap for daily data costs.

Those are actually features we intend to provide once we have the SMS feature with our service. We were going to store all incoming text messages in a mailbox on our website and then you would have the choice to let them go to your telna Mobile phone or forwarded via email or both. We could also store outgoing messages.

This makes sense, but that requires we develop a whole new product. It will be a little bit later as we have to do things in order.

Good news. The VOIP interface for inbound calls has been added.

Since this is kind of an advanced-feature, we put it in our "developers" box where we will add all the special features that don't really make sense for "basic" customers, but make a lot of sense for the tech specialists.

telna Mobile - Low cost cellular service for international travelers(reduced roaming for inbound and outbound calls while abroad)

What it looks like we are building here is a combination of features from Google Voice, Truphone, Gizmo and an international SIM. Google Voice has a virtual SMS number which forwards SMS to a US cell phone. It also has online voicemail. Truphone forwards calls to VOIP or mobile based on if the VOIP is connected or not. Gizmo provides VOIP connections to all sorts of places. I've often wished I could get them to work with each other better.

TelnaMobile looks like a pretty promissing service, but I for one will pass as for all international customers they ask for a copy of the national ID.

Just like I wouldn't give service providers my SSN (or canadian SIN), I don't distribute copies of my ID(s).

I'm impressed!