Lack of Activity in forum - Sign of times???
 

Moderators, you can move this if neccesary. Is it only me that notices that there has been a lack of activity in this forum, compared to what it used to be in the past. Could it be due to the fact that the usefulness of these international seems has been curtailed significantly, especially in the EU?

Just an observation, so I thought I'd get others opinion.

Seems so.

There's still a lot of potential benefit for this forum, in terms of finding country-specific SIMs. I'm surprised more nationals of a given country don't come to research the availability of prepaid service in their own country.

Absolutely! I actually meant the "International Sim" forum specifically. Since there used to be a whole more chatter about a year ago or so. The European forum is still quite active.

Agree 100%.....it really seems a lot has been consolidated to the point that we only have the Isle of Man cards (which frankly are pretty much all the same, sorry Ed), the Estonian cards (Air Baltic and calls to Estonian mobiles are very expensive and I've had trouble using them in France with enlinea) and now the e-kit passport cards (which seem pretty good although compared to what used to be, 49¢/minute to call from Europe to the USA with a 35¢ set up fee is not so hot)....with the availability of cheap German and British sim cards coupled with eu roaming rates, at least for travel to Europe, I wonder just how useful they will continue to be.

Also, for the now extremely curtailed international sim market, it seems like there are just too many of them. We'll probably see some of them close shop as time goes on. For example, on this forum's international carrierrs page quite a few are listed. Including UM and Yackie, which are not functioning right now. Unless yackie gives away their sim for free or come out with outrageously low rates, I am not sure what is left for them in this market.

I agree, although there is also the sharp drop in travel over the past couple of years, partly due to money and partly due to the sheer hassle of air travel now.

Personally I would think twice about ever getting another international sim, having had some use from GT-sim, 09, 0044, UM etc and then lost a little money on all of them - I'm probably not alone there.

It's cheaper for me to have domestic sims for the main counties (eKit Simple Calling for US/Can, Telcel for Mexico). And roam on one of my two UK no-monthly-fee postpaids in the rare cases I have to make/receive a call elsewhere (then get a local sim, if the length of stay justifies it).

Better than leaving money in a "global" sim that most likely won't be active next time I need to use it!

Summer is over.
 

How about this? Summer is now over and nobody needs a new SIM card because they are not going to be traveling again for a while. The last 9 months people were preparing for their trips and now that is over.
Time will tell.

I completely agree. Just one small comment to:
I suspect that each country has their own national telecom forums with a lot more chit chat on this.

Also I think we could do with a bit of a facelift in terms of being able to compare national SIMs for a given country. For example, a simple table with a few key fields which could enable 'side-by-side' comparisons of national SIMs/MVNOs. How about a handful of fields like:

SIM name; Package price; Startup credit included; Price/min national; National SMS; International SMS; Price/min to EU country; Price/min to USA; Data rate/MB.

Further details like roaming rates, international offers etc. can obviously still be found in the usual way.

yes, I would say the sharp drop of travel, combined with people also having solutions in hand. BUUT, I woud also add that other sites which I frequent and even popular peridicals have been publishing these types of solutions much more in the past 12 months. But the REAL info is always going to be here.

That's an interesting idea. The problem is that it's not easy for me to do everything by myself. I appreciate a lot the people who write me by e-mail sending updates about national operators. But creating a table like that for every country is quite a HUGE work and sometimes operators have A LOT of different offers which are complicated to summarize on a single page.
We wanted to create a wiki on PPGSM, but I never had the time and I'm not good with wikis... of course any help would be appreciated.

A wiki is a good idea in practice, but you're right that they take up phenominal amounts of time in their setup as well as to author pages, and keep feeding updated content. I fully appreciate the problems, and admit that many a good idea can quickly fall by the wayside due to lack of time.

Starting small may be the key. We have a wiki of sorts don't we? (Main Page - PrePaidPedia) I suppose one way of getting started is to makeup a generic template of a table. Someone who wants to take 'ownership' of a country could then quickly create the country page for his/her country in the wiki, and cut and paste the template table into the wiki page and fill in the contents of the table. Ideally he/she should maintain it from time to time too.

I'm sort of thinking of a table like this: (The example here is Spain)
http://img.xatakamovil.com/2009/08/complowcost.PNG
Of course I would also propose to add a few extra columns like cost of SIM, call setup cost, international voice call to a chosen destination, international SMS etc.

Anyhow, just ideas for now. Obviously I fully appreciate if this may not happen for a while...

no one mentioned the effect of VOIP solutions... on my last trip I used Skype more than my int'l SIMs... a LOT cheaper... and can be used on various handsets like WM smartphones...