[Stu]

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