[snaimon]

Some time ago I wrote to someone on Ebay who had purchased an 09 SIM.

Here is the reply I just received:

Sorry for the extreme lateness of this reply. i rarely do check my messages on ebay. if you are still interested let me answer your question as to the quality of the 09 service. sms seemed to be hit or miss most of the time. I have used the service for about 1 yr only now. the reason i started using 09 was because often i visit my family back in cambodia and 09 claims to have the most worldwide coverage with fairly reasonable rates. both incoming and outgoing work fairly well in cambodia, oddly enough in the United states it was almost impossible to use for outgoing calls but sms seemed to work just fine to my knowledge. i would keep getting error messages everytime i tried to make an outgoing call; it stated something to the effect of that 'the dialed numbers were not allowed' for one reason or another.

one other dissapointment is that the 09 homepage claims that their service works in both korea and japan. they also claim to be the only card that WILL work. to my dismay i found out this month(apr 11-25) that the service works in neither korea OR japan owing to the fact that those particular countries use some form of cdma vs gsm as their mobile infrastructure. this was inconvenient for me as i had to hunt down a phone shop in korea to rent a phone as well as wasted money on that original refill. although there IS a disclaimer on their homepage stating that it might not work in all parts of the countries listed... just some... but let's be honest, if you are traveling to korea or japan you're most likely going to visit the capitals at one point or another, and if it doesn't work in seoul or tokyo it most likely won't work in the rest of the country. my advice to you is if you are contemplating using the service during a trip DON'T purchase the sim! most countries(including cambodia, korea, and japan) have either prepaid SIMs or rental phones. it's much cheaper that way. to put it into perspective in both korea and japan phone rental is only like $3 a day...

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Stan