Have you seen www.rangeroamer.com? Is this Travelsim repacked and tailored for US market?

Also offered on Ebay as:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Global-Roaming-SIM-car...1QQcmdZViewItem

Free incoming in 36 countries. No setup fee outbound. High US rates. Free inbound SMS, but can't find the outbound rates in the PDF or on the site.

Also, new seller offering UM cards on Ebay today.

Stan

There are outbound rates only in online calc.

I love the implied notion that having a "European number" would be more convenient for your European callers. Yes, my friends from Germany would rather call an Estonian premium rate number than a US number which you can call for 1 eurocent a minute.

Why did you name European numbers of international SIMs "premium rate" ones :D???
AFAIR you have once used this term with regard to FL numbers.
They are just mobile numbers!

And all your idea seems a little strange to me. You get an opportunity not to pay for incoming calls in 36 countries. However, you want to pay for forwarded incoming calls US->Estonia mobile (or premium rate, if you wish ;)) anyway, only because your German friends would pay too much :whistle: .
Relax, Europe is all CPP and that's nothing strange here that calls to mobile phones are more expensive :). Since you are available on the mobile number, then it's obvious that people who call you must pay for this.

I think that Estonian mobile numbers are not so expensive, at least not as much as FL (00423). In my country (same situationa applies in many other countries) it is cheaper to dial 00372 instead of 00423663. There are still a few cheap routes for 00423663 but not as many

It seems odd that the firm is promoting their own 69c per minute forwarding as cheap, when people could find 20c to 25c or so.

There do seem to be cheaper possibilities for forwarding to FL, Iceland and IoM numbers at the moment though

Mainly greed, my friend. Some will find this service useful, I bet.

1. Self-interest (they must be making good money at 69 cents / minute)
2. Ease of use.
3. Encourage use will in USA and high rates.

Stan

I appreciate the difference between a caller pays mobile number and a "premium rate" number in the British sense of the word. It is not an 0900 number. To the extent that I chose that word, I let myself open for the criticism.

My sole point is and always was that despite the EU, each country is still a seperate entity. Calling a caller pays mobile in a neighboring country is not the same as telling a New Yorker to call an Ohio mobile. If I were to ask a Brit would you rather have my French number or my US one, they both reach me equally as well, the Brit would say which one is cheaper to call.

I choose to subsidize the cost of my incoming calls. That is a personal choice. I do so because I have too many SIMs and no one could possibly keep track of which number to reach me on unless I used call diversion.

The other problem is that most of my friends do not research the price of calling various destinations. My sister-in-law called my wife the other day. My wife is in Dubai on a UAE mobile. My sister-in-law was on her Verizon mobile phone in the US. My sister-in-law did not use a calling card and she did not even pay for an international calling plan for her Verizon phone. They talked for about an hour. My wife casually asked me what the call would cost her sister. When I guessed the price of the call at around US$100, my wife fell out of the chair.

If I was getting a call from one or two friends and I said, you can call this number cheaply by dialing 1010 this from your home phone, or buying a prepaid calling card on the "Blah Blah Blah Talk Calling Card Network," I'd pass the buck to them, but the ill-informed calling foreign CP networks can get burned badly.

I am NOT slamming Estonia. I am not saying that it is cheaper to call Lichtenstein. I pack Iceland and Lichtenstein roaming SIMs. Therefore, I have researched the price of connecting to those SIMs cheaply. I didn't think you could connect to IOM SIMs as cheaply and Andy effectively proved me wrong on that point.

With research, you can call most CP networks from outside a country at close to the same price as a domestic caller pays. Without research, however, you can get burnt worse.

There is no one best solution here. Riiing works well for me. 09 backs it up nicely. If I were a Brit, the IOM solutions would work fine. I would pay 0 for the calls and my callers would pay no more than reaching me on a UK mobile. That's easy.

For each one of us, we look at what countries we go to (coverage), price of the calls, and the feature set. I wouldn't have a wallet full of SIMs if there was one answer.

Stu

The $0.69 a minute rate was chosen because it was cheaper than the T-Mobile and Cingular incoming rates. If you compared this phone to roaming with your domestic carrier, it wins. They were not comparing themselves to people willing to put much sweat equity into finding cheaper routes. "They just want it easy."

Stu

Actually, the second quoted paragraph is much more likely than the first. Many people seem resigned to paying their main provider without any research of other possibilities. And if you do explain anything, their eyes glaze over in about one sentence of any explanation, even if it starts with the headline you can save 80% by ... (or am I just boring?). So the other day, and previously when going abroad, I just left a phone with 3 or 4 numbers programmed (including callthrough) and said try these in this order

I saved ?1000 a year on someone's phone bill about 3 years ago, but they still won't be convinced that the next ?1000 is also possible - what's the catch they ask. And one mobile in the firm has a line rental of ?17.50 a month and gets used for about a minute on average; I said I'd give them a free O2 payg SIM instead - oh we've just renewed the contract and got a new phone [worth about ?30!]

We're going to Sweden very soon, as a group of nearly 20. I've sent an email, asking it to be forwarded, that the best SIM to get is Halebop - 4p connection fee, same network 0p per minute, other Swedish 6p/min, all sms 4p, UK landlines 10p/min. The 100 SEK first top-up + 100 SEK start bonus would last the whole visit unless calling UK mobiles a lot. I bet we end up with all different ones though.

And I bet not many people calling us will reach the Swedish mobile numbers for 5p per minute from a BT landline as I'll recommend, as it involves a few minutes setting up an account, and also using a callthrough number ...