[RTuesday]

This debacle is really going to damage the "global sims" business - which was already loads of resellers competing (mostly unprofitably) for a very small niche market. They'll get terrible (word of mouth) publicity from early adopters like us - they're unreliable, hard to recharge, change the rules and rates without notice, and you can lose all your money.

Certainly I doubt I need to bother replacing my global sims. In many cases, they havn't worked when I've needed them (e.g. 09 in Mexico, at times), or have had rates changed so that they were not the same deal I brought (so become useless).

Adding in the wasted sim cost and recharges to the per-minute costs, and the need to have backups for when they don't work, they become really debatable for me (for a heavier user who goes to more countries it might be different).

Since I spend 80%+ of my time in just 4 countries (including Mexico which now has free incoming on local sims), the global sims have lost me as a customer. I'll rely on local sims, wifi voip on my Nokia 770, plus my non-contract postpaid sims from Orange UK and Virgin UK for the odd time I need to make a call elsewhere.

Even if the postpaid roaming calls cost many times that of a global sim, they just work - and don't require prepaid credits that disappear. The cost, for low usage, will probably work out similar, and a lot less bother.