Alternate ways for U.S. users to travel cheaply, phonewise

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by snidely

DRN - That is great to know. How many carriers in the world do this? As i recall, technically when you are roaming, the system does assign you a temporary number. Problem is, you never (usually) know what it is.

My understanding is that you really don't get a fixed temporary number, rather it is assigned from a pool of such numbers only when a call is in progress. When your home carrier tells the roamed carrier it has an incoming call the roamed carrier then tells the home carrier what number to send it to. It all happens in a couple of seconds.

Having a known, fixed number that is good for an extended period of time is fairly unusual.