[Stu]

I love VOIP and have been struggling with Asterisks for years. I don't think it is at the point where it can replace roaming or prepaid SIMs. I think it can supplement them and bring the price down, but it isn't a complete replacement.

UMA connects to more wifi connections than SIP does. Because it is still relatively obsure, it is not received the same attention from folks working on blocking technology. From what I've seen watching this forum, most of us have gravitated towards VOIP and use it where it is available. Many of us now run our own call forwarding service abroad. I use naked DIDs and Voicetrading accounts. I have softphones and have a client on my E65 and E71. Version 2.0 will offer a conditional divert to my mobile stopping at my VOIP connection if available.

TMobile (IMHO) opinion had the perfect roaming device and shot themselves in the foot. We dropped TMobile's Blackberry International Plan when they changed the way they interpreted the contract. Because my wife pulls e-mail from to Exchange servers, only one could go on BES. The other was coming in using a program called Astrasync which is an Activesync clone for Blackberry. We got a $500 roaming bill for data because of this. I got the charged reversed, but jump ship for ATT's international Blackberry plan which includes all on device data. This is a data only device. The device was a Tmobile blackberry and she can SIM swap to get a connection via Tmobile, but ATT doesn't support UMA.

My wife still has Tmobile for voice with an UMA compatible handset, but the Blackberry is the only UMA phone that works well in a hotspot that requires a browser to log on. As you know from HoFo, I keep on hoping that someone will make a working VOIP client for Blackberry, but it is not in the cards.

In Europe, in room wifi can easily run you 20 Euros. I've even seen 30. If you are going to buy the net, you might as well make the free calls, but if you pop down 20 euros just to make the calls, the economics change. I'm taking a Baltic cruise in two months, cruise ship internet is real pricey, but excluding Russia (I'm in free incoming territory), I've got routes to UK mobiles down to $0.07 a minute incoming at the moment. The cruise ship's internet is probably satellite (the ship respositions around the world -- it doesn't just do the Baltic run). I think I am better with prepaid. If Three continues its "Three Like Home" offer, I should be able to have 3g data on my notebook in Denmark and Sweden for 10 quid total.

I know that you and Newcomb have stayed with Tmobile's grandfathered old roaming rates., I ditched them when I could no longer get a straight quote about what roaming was in a particular country on a particular network. In Kuwait, one network was a $1.50 incoming while the other network was $7.50. I remembered that, but forgot which was which. They could not answer the question and I gave up after two hours with tech support. That was what made me give up. I switched to a roaming SIM. I'm bumbed about the failures this year and have lost roughly $200US to these failures, but I still think they are a good tool. I'm keeping the money I have on these SIMs very low, but I have a Geodessa and a Celtrek SIM right now.

In sum, I think VOIP is a great supplement to a roaming SIM or a local prepaid, but I'm not prepared to say they are no longer needed. We talked about your stay in Dubai and you were at an airport with free wifi and at the largest tech show in the Middle East. As I recall you forgot your travel router and couldn't connect in your hotel room. Ninety percent of that stay was in wired areas.