Dear Effendi-

Although I have used country-specific prepaid SIM cards in the past, I will be taking a multi-country vacation trip with my wife in September :love: which probably requires an "international" card. At this point, the United Mobile and Yackie Mobile cards are in contention.

As to the UM card, the data on this site suggests that calls to the U.S. will cost something in the neighborhood of $2.00 per minute :o . Based on my analysis of what is shown on the UM website, it appears that the cost of a call to the US (from most of Europe) is $0.79 for the first minute, and $0.49 thereafter. Am I missing something in my analysis?

The disadvantage of the UM card, from my perspective, is that calls to a +423 cell phone from my US land-line carrier (AT&T) are charged at a rate of $0.43 per minute. On the other hand, such calls are "free" at the receiving end.

The main attraction of the Yackie Mobile plan is that it will be essentially free to a person calling from the United States, of some importance to me since the people calling will probably be either my children, or my office. (In either case, I will end up paying :sad: .) On the other hand, it looks like I will have to pay $0.24 per minute on the receiving end when using the Yackie card, the card itself is more expensive, and the company appears to be suffering from growing pains, at present. Fortunately, I have time to see how this plays out.

I would appreciate it if you (or anyone else) would comment on any flaws in my analysis.

Lastly, many thanks for maintaining this valuable site. I have learned a lot in my visits here.

Carl

Hi Carl (almost a homonymous!) and welcome to the forum! :beer:
I split the discussion since that other one is only for reviews while it's better to open a new topic when you need specific information.

Back to the main topic, here on this site, as on UM site, it's listed that calling the US from Zone 1 costs 0.35+0.25 on the first minute and 0.39 for the following minutes. The USA is on Zone 1 as destination, while it's on Zone 7 as origin for calls. That means that UM is good if you go to Europe and call the States, while it's bad if you go to the US and call anywhere.

The rest you wrote is correct, it's never easy which one to choose, surely UM is a good product and we all know it works well, Yakie is something new and by now no one has received its sim-card yet, so maybe it's better to wait a bit, if you're not in a hurry.

One advantage of UM cards comes when you couple the UM card with a CallbackWorld account. CBW charges only 14c/min to call UM, so you can give your family a toll-free number with a PIN code to reach you for only 14c/min rather than 24c/min. Also, if you have a way to trigger a callback that 14c/min rate will also apply to calls you originate.

IF you get the UM card, you also get a service PIN2DEST or you can setup callbacks to 2 other #s. With PIN2DEST you give your children, friends, work your PIN for PIN2DEST and they can call your UM card for 14 cents per minute. I think you will have full visibility of what number calls what other number in case they abuse the privilege.

But there are other ways. If they call you, you can take a short call from them for 43 cents and then call them back. Certainly 43 cents is not going to bankrupt them. Also, if they have a US GSM phone, they can probably send your UM phone and SMS and you can call them back.

I am sure there are other ways. I am planning on having people just call either my work or home voice mail which I will check every day, probably from a land line using a calling card OR using CBW and the UM card.

Stan

Thanks to everyone for the very helpful insights and suggestions!

Carl

Whats the website for pin2dest?

pin2dest is a function of callbackworld.com

When you open up an account with callbackworld (www.callbackworld.com), they give you up to 3 triggering numbers in the United States for callbacks in case you have more than 1 mobile phone or want to use callbacks to get cheaper long distance orinternational service on your own landline, and a pin2dest which you can key to any phone number you want.

It should be noted the pin2dest is a US toll free number which most carrier do not charge extra to call and rates to the USA are usually very low on many ld cards throughout the world, when it is answered the caller is prompted to enter the pin and the call goes to your designated number. All this can be set via the website when you open up an account.

At present, there is no termination fee for calls on callbackworld to Liechtenstein mobiles so the person whose account is being used would be charged the rate of 14? US billed in 6 second increments and the person making the call pays for a call from wherever to a US toll free number (usually the same as just to the US)...has been very very reliable recently after a bunch of problems last summer.

The only concern many of us have is the 14? rate is much lower than most rates for US to Liechtenstein (AT&T ld service is lower, 10?/minute on a special $1/month plan but this would only be good for those US folks using AT&T ld as their landline ld carrier) and cbw has a competitor called enlinea which until January of this year was only charging 12?/minute for calls US to Liechtenstein and used to provide a US toll free without a pin but as noted in January raised the rate to something like 62?/minute and is now charging $1.50/month for the US toll free number but the point is they seemed to be using the same carrier so it is our fervent hope this is not raised.

You forgot to say that CBW has toll free access numbers not only in the US but in many other countries as well.

Chris

Sorry, you're right...I always think in terms of making calls from mobile phones but in some European countries you can use a local toll free number to access pin2dest.