United Mobile - dead, CallBlue - dead, FreeGlobalSim - dead; just ordered TravelSim
 

For the past 2 years i've had 3 SIM cards that came and went.
Every time they die overnight and take away any credit in the account and the access phone number.

I put my trust now in TravelSim.

If anyone can explain the business model behind these free roaming SIMs i'll be happy to learn something.

A total guess by me....

This business has been very gravely affected by the push by the eu to cap roaming rates. Europeans (and I'm not so perhaps some of them here can chime in) used to cross borders a great deal and when roaming rates were asininely high, it was very advantageous for them to have cheaper alternatives. A Brit might take a holiday in Spain and with vodafone and the rest charging an arm and a leg (well maybe just an arm) to roam, they were a very fertile market for these sim cards.

But with eu roaming rates coming down, down, down, well the need became far less. That left who? Well we Americans, stuck with the near criminal roaming rates charged by our gsm carriers (the cheapest rate is 99¢/minute to make and receive calls say in Western Europe, found the ability to receive calls for free and to call back to home for 0,29€ to be a bargain (same is probably true for Canadians, Australians) when holidaying in Europe and other places......also a factor became the high termination fees for calls to such out of the way areas as Estonia, Liechtenstein where many of these cards were based....

Another factor, and I plead guilty, were the cheapskates like me who used the free reception of calls and found ways with the help of callback firms such as Enlinea to not make any calls using the international cards. After all, who can pass up a bargain eh.

Now if only something were done to stop the near criminal roaming rates charged by T Mobile USA to roam on T Mobile UK (although I think I read somewhere that T Mobile UK is getting out of the business) where it pays itself for roaming, well then maybe our need for international cards will die completely (perhaps one reason for the push to have a dual UK/USA card).

Hi all,

Always been a key viewer on this very interesting forum but first post!

I am representing CallKey and a few of you will be familiar with the name, although we tend to sit in the background as we are a wholesale white label company, only dealing with Distributors and not end users.

This is an interesting thread and i speak with the experience of the old CallKey company having serious problems. It is no doubt true that with the Euro tariff being enforced it does leave reduced margins with fewer savings to be had (within the EU). That being said, and as a typical example travellers to Dubai in UAE can save bundles in comparison to the very high roaming charges that UK network operators impose. This applies to many more countries worldwide.

The US has always been a potentially huge market but the one big obstacle has been what is called MTC (Mobile Termination Charges). This is exactly why we have signed the deal to provide our Distributors with UK / USA Dual IMSI SIM cards. These will offer free inbound in the US, roaming nationally on ATT&T and T-Mobile. On top of that outbound calls from the US to EU will be the equivalent of calling within the EU. Check with your local network operator your roaming charges in the US and see the real savings to be had. This Dual IMSI SIM will see ourselves, our Distributors and ultimately the end users benefit from tremendous savings, and at the same time being profitable for all parties.

Thanks

John

CallKey

GeoSIMs Dual Number UK/US SIM will have coverage in 203 countries. Both the UK and US number will roam in all countries and have free incoming calls in the US. The US will become "part of Europe" in terms of calling when in the US.

Much of the additional coverage is in Africa, Middle East, South and Central America and a number of island states. In total an additional 68 countries over our standard GeoSIM.

We are updating our site as we finalise details on call pricing but the <a href="http://www.globalsimcard.co.uk/dual_std_comparison.php">coverage list is here
</a>

Again, can someone explain how free roaming works?

GSM operators are obliged to pay per-minute termination fees when their customers receive calls while connected to foreign networks.

how come IOM and Lichtenstein GSM operators are exempt from termination fees ?

is that a reciprocal agreement of no-termination-fees between these particular countries and the 60-130 countries that are listed on "free roaming" sim suppliers sites ?

In general this is would be commercially sensitive information so you are unlikely to get any detail on this or of particular business models, especially on a public forum.

I have been hearing about those Dual Number UK/US SIM. Does it mean that if I am traveling in Europe with the Dual Number SIM, and a person in the U.S. calls the U.S. number, the incoming call in Europe is a free call?

With the Dual IMSI receiving calls on the US number will never be free and will always have a small inbound charge. There are commercial reasons behind this. Whilst in the US receiving calls on the +44 number will in general be free but again there will be a small inbound charge for receiving on the +1.

John

CallKey

As general and summary can be found here

Hello,

Yes.

Liechtenstein Prefix +423 663 is a "premium" number prefix, this means, Caller have to pay a higher fee, to reach those numbers. Liechtenstein Telco gave a higher amount to United-Mobile and therefore they could pay the interconnect till China for example. But there must have been a new Interconnect-Tariff regime, UM decided to upset their pricing and to charge one time even per incoming call.

IoM (Isle of Man) and Jersey Calls are billed as "landline" but they are ending in mobile system. These Islands have unbalanced calls. Less Calls are going TO the island, most calls are going from the islands. So an international mobile phone company attracts lots of incoming callers and minutes.

But those models are very hard calculated and if the ugly customers do not make enough outgoing calls and pay for this (and do NOT use free incoming to set up a external Callback like "Enlinea" or others) then the model gets instable.

It is readily apparent. The roaming is NOT free. The bill for the call shows up on your home or office or customer's bill when they call you. These costs are MUCH higher than making a call to a cell phone with a regular lst world SIM. The costs imposed to call a LIctenstein SIM, were so high that many LD carriers in the U.S. refused to route calls to a Lichtenstein (ergo United Mobile SIM because they had to deal w. outraged customers when they got their bill.
The Estonian SIMS, while imposing high costs upon callers, aren't quite as outrageous as Lichtenstein was. Estonia only double most other countries instead of triple or quadruple.

Bottom line - your friends and clients are paying big bucks so you can get "free" calls.

...mike

But it wasn't always this way.....I remember a trip I took in 2005 to Central Europe...I used call forwarding on my Verizon landline through my ld carrier AT&T to my riing (UM was called that then) +423 number. At the time, AT&T charged 10¢/minute for calls to Liechtenstein with a termination fee of 1¢...also the callback carriers for outgoing were charging 12¢/minute...what a bargain! Others kept telling me of the high termination fees to Liechtenstein but I sat back very content.

It was shortly thereafter the termination fees to Liechtenstein shot through the roof even on AT&T so much so that it forced UM to move its prime business to Jersey (+44) where I was paying the usual termination charge to +44 numbers although the call back services became very expensive and remain so today to +44....so I switched over to O9 for a while...I was paying 16¢/minute well through this past winter on O9 to call back to the USA using either a couple of local sims I had or UM for reception. I, of course as I have said, am the classic case of taking but not giving.....

But to me it has become abundantly clear that a major part of the business model has been lost by Europeans who travel within Europe not thinking it really necessary to use anything but their own networks due to the capping of roaming rates by the eu.

Now, we have the vodafone three month promotion of its passport service with free roaming throughout almost all of Continental Europe plus the added benefits of Australia and New Zealand. Quite a discussion going on in the European section....while the offer is only from Vodafone UK, I can't believe the other vodafone subsidiaries will not be forced to match as well as the other British carriers.

At least for this summer, if travelling within Europe, the vodafone offer seems to be the way to go...and with vodafone UK sim cards available for next to nothing or even for nothing, how can you go wrong even if it's only for this one summer?

Thank you for clarifying!

and also thanks to others who explained about the Lichtenstein premium number trick. Betamax charges 0.07EUR/min for calls to the UK Islands.

Regarding the new Vodafone UK 3 months free roaming trial, indeed it seems like a new trend will emerge for European operators.
This is probably sign of recession: less business travelers and those that do, care more about their spending. Resulting profit loss for Vodafone UK probably equates to less than 3 months of advertisement spending and this stunt will likely have better ROI.

Matha531

You said "although the call back services became very expensive and remain so today to +44....". What do you mean very expensive? Callback rates through a +44 SIM seem cheap to me.

For me, Callback rates aren't the problem, it's connection reliability. During my last few months using UM, Callback World callbacks to my UM +423 had stopped working completely, and callbacks to my UM +44 worked at most 10% of the time.

Now, using Sim4Travel, I'm having slightly better success with CBW Callbacks, but no better than 50% success. In France for some reason, it's closer to 25% success, regardless of network.

Kupe

Let me try to explain my thinking on this...

In the "glory" days of UM (AKA riing), I used both cbw and enlinea for my calls out along with the free calls in. I was paying something like 14¢ (all prices here US) to make a call from wherever back to the USA. The service was fairly reliable too, except in France (which has always seemed to be a problem...do the French telcoms block these calls??)....

In any event, then we had the staggering increase in termination fees to +423 so that using cbw and enlinea became uneconomical. Then I switched to O9 which until this very January I was paying 11¢/minute on enlinea (well it was supposed to be 16¢/minute to an Icelandic mobile but for some reason, they had my number not pegged as a mobile)....it worked as late as this past January. In the interim, I had investigated +44 UM and the listed prices on both enlinea and cbw for calls to the USA on +44 phones was close to 50¢/minute (haven't checked it in a while)...France and Germany were listed at around 27¢/minute (and they worked okay this past January) and Estonia was listed somewhat cheaper but for some reason, I could not get the callbacks on my Air Baltic phone while in France (but I could on Orange FR and the triggering numbers were one digit apart!)...

I will be travelling back to Germany, France and the UK next month....with UM being deceased, well I still have a live French sim with Orange FR...I probably would use it while in France with enlinea (although since the French steal your credit, sob's that they are whenever your initial top up wears off, I generally do try to use it up)...I've been put onto a German provider called sonoma or something like that...I, if I can figure out the German web site (there should be a rule they all have to use English for language illiterates like me)...they seem to charge 0,05€ or something like that to call the USA...failing that I might opt to use the Vodafone UK passport promotion coupled perhaps with a calling card (still pricey at 20p/minute)...for receiving calls and of course in the UK there's no problem....oh for the simple days of UM+423 and low termination fees!

I dont understand this persistent reasoning that one or two callback providers rates represent a large chunk of the market, and that their increases say something about termination fees due to the destination network. No, 50 cents to UK is over the top compared to wholesale 5p or so to the mainland networks

andy, where would you recommend finding callback rates lower than 40cents/min from a UK sim? I am very interested...