Are intl. pre-pay cards obsolete?
 

Roaming in the EU is now almost free and in 19 months will be completely free. Tmobile U.S. customers have had unlimited text and data in 120+ countries for 2 years. Voice calls - 20 cents/min.

Thanks for asking!
 

Perhaps, but not quite yet?
It has gotten awfully quiet here, hasn't it?

Along with your T-Mobile, Google Fi might be an option
if Google allows it to grow and prosper.

There are still many countries where T-Mobile's rates are outlandish (e.g. $4.19/min in French Polynesia, $2.99/min in Jordan).

in these countries most SIM are either very expensive or quite unreliable.

To my mind the international SIM cards will mostly be used by business users who need multiple numbers at a time on one reasonable priced SIM card in the future

T-Mo USA has good international roaming rates in many but not all countries. But the 20 US cents/minute rate is on more expensive plans not perfect for light voice users and their domestic rural US coverage is not as good as some other carriers like AT&T or Verizon.

Still think there's a place for international roaming sims or buying local prepaid sims.

And there's always other alternatives like VOIP, SIP, calling or callback cards at a payphone, or prepaid satphones.

I think for the next 'while' [purposely vague so I might even be right!]
If your preferred solution does not have a good price for a certain country or countries then you will search for an alternative.

A local SIM or an International SIM might be the preferred solution.
If just one country, a local SIM might be the easy solution.
Lots of countries? If you can find an International SIM that has good rates for the countries you need than that is enough.

It will be interesting to see what transpires.

I am/was on the fence but with VZ's travel pass program announced this week I'm being pushed away from International SIMs... For basically the price I would pay for the international SIM usage, I can keep my own phone on my own plan... Hard to justify the (sometimes) frustration and experimentation of other SIMs while out of the country with the prices dropping to these levels...

I agree. The international sims are becoming less useful to a lot of folks these days. Those verizon passes are not bad, especially for short trips, or short trips that span multiple countries. For me, I have local sims for the 2 countries that I visit the most, since I am usually there for at least 1 week.

I've been using TMo's international roaming since it first came out, saves a lot of hassle. But:
- friends and family in UK, etc get upset when they reply and pay $2-3/min, because they are calling US number - so I'm looking for reasonable call forwarding so that I can give people a local number.

- if I'm on wifi calling abroad, I understand it looks like I'm on US network, which is fine for calling back to US, but for local calls to UK when I'm there, it costs me a fortune - right? had trouble getting a straight answer on this..

thanks

Worldsim and Piranha have both UK and US phone numbers attached to one SIM.
Piranha Mobile has Call Forwarding and Call Offload.
Also comes with a UK number. [Is this number usable for receiving calls from locals? That is
it is seen as a normal UK number and not something that is charged extra?]

I think either of these would solve your UK number problem if the number is 'usable'.

Worldsim also has call forwarding. See below.

https://accounts.worldsim.com/selfse...egory=homeAway