Chart comparing Roaming Rates for 4 intl. SIMS in 190 countries
 

Also included are the 2 U.S. GSM carriers.

I had a hard time finding easy to grab Manx rates. As mentioned on the chart, the Manx card I used, "National Geographic - Talk Abroad", seems to have weird rates. In a few instances, INcoming is more than OUTgoing. I also noticed that they claim they use the same non-functional VM United Mobile used to have. They say calls won't go to VM unless the phone is on! You can force ALL calls to VM. I don't know whether this is a function of all Manx cards or just this one.


http://us.f13.yahoofs.com/bc/4432dad...zMa9FB7td3BNic

If that doesn't work, try:

http://rapidshare.com/files/20725101...rates.pdf.html

I would have posted it here, but the 29K PDF file exceeds the limits here by 10K.

I guess I could also post it on Yahoo in .xls format if people want.

Please let me know where there are errors. (Note I said not "if" ther are errors.

...mike

I can not download it. Please upload it in rapidshare.com and give us the link. Its easier this way!

See edited post above and let me know if that works. They both worked for me on tests.

Thanks.

My main problem with creating the chart is that different carriers list Bosnia, Serbia etc. and a few other places by different names. N.G. still lists Yugoslavia as a country and I'm not sure which country they refer to.

Wow!
 

Snidely, that is indeed some effort you've put forth. Thank you very much.

Great job! Thanks!

I have two questions:

Who reliably terminates to the United Mobile numbering range for $0.30 a minute? (CBW excluded).

What leads you to believe the cost to terminate calls to the IoM numbering ranges (07624 and 07924) will go up?

Re: IOM rates.
There was a "high end" telephony conf. about 10 days ago in S.F. sponsored by oreillynet.com. There were at least 200 people there from all over the world.
No - I didn't spend the $2K to attend. However, I did go one afternoon and evening when you could sign up and get into the Exhibit Hall for free. I couldn't help it if I accidentally walked in on a couple of conferences. Many/most of the sessions were WAY above my head.
Anyway, I wound up talking to someone w. a UK accent - a person who is somewhat well known in "telephony circles" in the U.S., (he was interviewed by Reuters about an hour earlier). I asked him about the IOM "carriers". He said that the free ride for the IOM resellers will probably end soon - for the same reason the Iowa "free calling to Europe" operations were shut down.
[An aside, there is still one of those free calls to many countries operations with a Minnesota number 218-339-1990. At least it was still working last Friday.]

He didn't tell me the exact reasons and I didn't know anyone else to verify this with.
My guess is that either (1) the central UK govt. subsidizes the IOM operator and/or (2) there is a much higher termination cost for calling an IOM number that the carriers either (a) don't know about or (b) do know but their systems can't distinguish between calls going to diff. UK - +44 - systems.
I do know that some operators can't distinguish between calls going to the mainland U.S. and countries in the Carribean w. +1 numbers for setting rates.

So, for now, this is just a RUMOR. I have seen this mentioned either here or elsewhere in a forum.

...mike

Termination fees to Liechtenstein vary widely...as of January, the best seems to be on the AT&T $1/month international plan I have...calls to Liechtenstein are 10¢/US billed, unfortunately in 1 minute intervals and the termination fee to a Liechtenstein mobile is.....hold your breath...1¢ (not a misprint)..

Verizon, my landline carrier, allows remote call forwarding so when I'm in those European countries where I don't have prepaid sims, I use United Mobile and set my phone to forward to the United Mobile sim and the calls indeed come through at 11¢/minute (as noted unfortunately rounded up to the next highest minute which is the way AT&T does it but you can't have everything!)

Re: Calling a +423 mobile.

Our landline LD carrier is: IDT. (idt.net).
From their web site: Liechtenstein 423 9¢ 9¢

They make no distinction between landline and cellular! 18 months ago when I had a UM card, I made a test call and was billed that amount (or maybe it was even a cent more at the time).
Wouldn't do me any good because, unlike Verizon, PacBell doesn't allow forwarding to intl. numbers.
Voicestick would charge 36 cents. Kall8 92 cents!!. Others in the past, here, said ATT LD only charges 10 cents. CBW - 14. Onesuite 25.

So, I picked 30 cents.

As for Estonia - CBW is 22, Voicestick and IDT, 23. However, Kall8 is 52. My usual dial around carrier, Onesuite, is 40.

IOM was a last minute addition. Rates I found for calling a UK mobile are:
Voicestick-16, IDT-40!, Onesuite-18, CBW-40. I should look up the rates for the other, major U.S. LD carrier-MCI?

Now that I look at all this - none of the pricing makes any sense!!! My main objective was to make sure people took all factors into consideration. Eg. UM is the only one to charge a "connection fee" on outgoing.
AND the main point is: Free Incoming is far from free. The cost simply shows up on a different bill.
"Foreigners" try to tell us 'muricans that we are at a disadvantage because their incoming is free. They neglect to factor in the 12 to over 20 cent per min. cost that shows up on their landline bill. Here, for $50, I can buy 3000 min. anytime airtime for less than 2 cents/min. It is FREE for the caller to call me.

I am open to suggestions as to what figure should be shown for the "average" user - not the cheap (frugal?) people here.

...mike

The rapidshare link worked! Thank you for this chart!

Since we talk about termination fees, I have recently noted that many carriers start charging hagher rates to dial a 09 mobile (+354). The situation seems comparable to that of UM albeit not so many charging high fees at present....

EDIT: I have just noticed that the incoming rate to Argentina with UM is wrong. It 0.59 euros (around 0.78 $).

Great work! :)
As for about calling Liechtenstein, IOM or Estonia, here in Italy it's great to use one of the postpaid plans of 3 which, in the worst case, costs 9 cent/min (per minute billing) to call both Estonia and IOM, while FL is still expensive....
I think I'll recharge my Travelsim before going to Georgia and Armenia next summer...

It sounds rather too speculative to me, and the termination and subsidy issues would be on rather different scales if indeed they are the reason.

I understand, perhaps wrongly, that it was when AT&T, not the taxman, found itself with multi-million dollar bills that those Iowa numbers came under scrutiny, though it was presumably federal policy to mandate the subsidies.

Manx is not simply a poky regional operator, but part of a larger firm. I doubt that the person you met has detailed knowledge of any cross-subsidies between the companies and the Manx and UK governments, and whether the regulators have it on the agenda. Ofcom don't seem quick on reducing de-facto subsidy due to the higher termination charges of 3, didn't intervene on 07744 callthough number issues, and given the pig's ear that they have been making of shared-revenue numbering issues for several years, I don't think we'll see fast progress on something more complicated.

I don't think your case 2b is likely. Anyone who can program a dialplan to filter and select carriers to use can distinguish between different phone number prefixes. Some Asterisk pundits do this at home for themselves, but on a global scale all retail call providers will be doing something similar, including a few mistakes we may or may not be aware of. Some carriers can and do have separate rates for the different UK mobile networks.

For another example, some cheap providers have slightly different tariffs for US landlines and mobiles. It is possible to tell the difference, but whether they do so correctly I don't know.

There is a callback company in the UK that still has a rate of 2 pence a minute from UK mobile to UK landline, probably still a promotional price, as their sister companies are in the 4 to 8 pence range. Usually the callback has come back with no caller ID, but I have seen about 5 Nanjing Chinese gateway numbers.

If Finarea could do it on a bulk scale, maybe we can try having a look there too. Is it far-fetched to use China? Well, I recently set up a VoIP account in Brazil, but I have no idea if I will ever go or even phone anyone there.

Andy...

I'm really not sure how one can distinguish between US landlines and US mobiles....they have exactly the same range of numbers and the FCC does not allow discrimination for one service over another.

Let me give you an example....area code 917 was introduced in NY and originally it was to be just for mobiles and pagers to relieve some of the pressure on 212 and 718....the FCC ruled this practice was illegal and now there are many landlines in the NYC area with area code 917...all the distinctions seem to be blurring....you can have a 347 area code number for your landline or for your mobile or for your voip number (the only thing difficult to get for any of these in the NYC area are 212 numbers!)....or am I missing something?

Matha531 I was also wondering how a voip company could distinguish US landlines from mobiles....

Actually ...

Try a few searches on the www.numberingplans.com website, that Przemolog first recommended to us

http://www.numberingplans.com/?page=...is&sub=phonenr

- mess around with the next 3 digits after the area code, eg the 555 of common examples - you will find provider information comes up for valid results, and some of these are mobile phone companies

I rather doubt that many companies would actually bother to keep and search such databases to determine tariffs or for any other reason, but it is hypothetically possible

Here are some of the 917 allocations you mentioned
http://www.numberingplans.com/?page=...ent_page=12288

...which leads to the question do the US mobile carriers use termination fees the same way European and other places do...in other words does it cost a provider more to dial into a mobile number than to a landline or other number in the USA? I don't think so.

I've seen one website that had slightly varying rates for different area codes in USA, but can't remember where it was, and I don't think there were exchanges listed within area codes. I expect those Iowa numbers were a bit higher.

Some of the Betamax VoIP companies say they have differing retail rates, but their wholesale arm VoiceTrading has the same for both

http://backsla.sh/betamax

- but as I suggest, how likely is it they would bother to look up a table with over 130,000 elements?

Highly unlikely I must say......

I think the area codes that have different rates are those in Alaska and Hawaii sometimes....

Great job on a cross-carrier rate chart!

Suggestion...can you post the .xls file on Rapidshare or here(Rapidshare works OK, can't retrieve the Yahoo file for some reason) so we can add to it? Some people may want to figure out what the termination rate is to different countries or add other carriers.

Also possible to post here by zipping the file (bigger uploads allowed for compressed files than raw spreadsheets or PDF's).

Also think minor blooper on United Mobile direct dial outgoing from Canada to US (rate shown I think is incoming rate which you wouldn't get unless you used Callback World for a double call back).

The UK government doesn't have anything to do with Manx Telecom (apart from anything else, MT is now a division of Telefonica of Spain). Nor does it have any direct control over phone systems in the IOM, that's the job of the Isle of Man Communications Commission.

The IOMCC does have to deal with the UK's Ofcom for number ranges, much like countries like Caymans +1 345 have to deal with Nanpa, because the country code is shared. But Ofcom doesn't control the rates or how the numbers are used.

I don't think there's any reason other than lack of will (or number availability, or regulation) why any UK based mobile company couldn't do something similar to what is being done with Manx number ranges. It costs so much to call any UK mobile number that there is plenty of room for the forwarding/roaming cost.

Indeed many of the UK 0844/0871 etc international callthrough numbers like pennyphone.co.uk (similar to the Iowa numbers) do already forward calls internationally at rates to the (domestic) caller that are lower than calling UK mobiles.

There's no loophole or subsidy being exploited anywhere for the Manx numbers - they are simply using the high incoming charges to "UK" mobiles to pay for the forwarding/roaming. Same could be done with UK numbers, or Jersey/Guernsey.

On your last sentence - I'd be amazed if any carrier charged the Caribbean at US rates, other than as an initial error. With all the premium rate numbers there they wouldn't last long...

Thanks for doing the chart, I'd be interested to see it, but I currently can't reach the chart with either link.

Here's the chart snidely so kindly put together (zipped pdf file attachment).

I want to add that there are carriers (Like OTE, the Greek main TELCO) that charge higher rates for calls to some mobile ranges in the UK, including the +447624 and +447924 prefixes. Rates are twice as high than normal mobile operators (Orange, vodafone, Tmobile, O2).

When they were asked about this they claimed that they pay higher termination fees to these Uk carriers....

Thanks for that. Very interesting chart, although it shows up how complex (and specific to each user) all this is - since it's geared to being called from the US (especially with the "real costs" surcharges).

But there's no practical way to make anything more universal (other than via a web application, which would be very hard to keep up to date). Especially when you start to factor in voip (and other) forwards, callbacks, where the main inbound callers like to call from and to, etc - plus of course many published rate lists are not accurate...

Send me your email. I am hoping the moderator will post the PDF file here. Less than 30K.
I'll post the. xls file at those other sites tomorrow. It is 69K.

...mike

You were right - did put incoming where outgoing was. Did same for Argentina.
And left UM's Peru's rates (which are also the same) out altogether. All listed on their web site today in the same pricing zone of countries being 2.49 out, .69 in. I use the option to show pricing in USD.
Also heard about a couple other omissions - like the country of Rwanda, which is covered by CelTrek, Cingular, and T-M.
I'll release ver. 1.1 next week.

...mike

I'm not sure what is meant by a 'free ride' by IoM carriers. Operations from IoM work on a fully regulated basis and within standard contracts. Any offers that are made are the result of normal 'blending' not by exploiting any loopholes.

I updated the COMPARISON CHART on our International Cards page here on PrepaidGSM.net. Take a look to see if you think it's ok and useful ;)

really good :)

Hi Matha-

I realize this thread is quite old, but I wanted to ask if your AT&T rate to Liechtenstein Mobile has stayed anywhere close to that good. We have the AT&T Int'l Select Value Plan on our home landline, and the rates to Europe are generally pretty good. The base rate to Liechtenstein is .09/minute, but the termination fee is .50/minute. Total is .59/minute, up from .44/minute just a couple months ago. Uggh.

Kupe

OneSuite International Roaming Rates Compared with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile

^^^ Roaming charts from different providers I've found from Onesuite website.

Single American +1 Prepaid SIM Card
 

Guys,
Can someone please advise me on where to get a single american prepaid SIM card that offers good international roaming...?
I was using one before but they are no longer active talking about upgrading their system for a better quality service and its taking forever to come back.

please anyone, who can help with where to get and please I do not need the dual number service as offered by callkey and others.

Thanks guys.

I recommend you Telnamobile Telna - Telecom North America, formerly 3U Telecom (cheap long distance and low international phone rates) or Gt-Sim GT-SIM, I own them, I am overwhelmed:)

http://www.ais.co.th/roaming/en/

I used the SIM in Japan, Africa,Germany,Spain with no Problems.