Virgin Mobile UK Now Roams in the US

[MATHA531]

...as noted the value of roaming in the US is absolutely not to make calls but to be able to keep it alive cheaply....for example UM required one paid activity every 9 months although according to most, it's loosely enforced....calls are very expensive but sending an sms is much cheaper and serves the purpose...as noted where internet is available, a quick download of a ring tone from a free service will also do the trick....with Virgin Mobile as noted it was 9p and voila problem solved....

Mobile World (before the advent of the other cheap services such as Orange Call Abroad) from Carphone Warehouse was a good deal but without roaming ability, the card expired after 60 days originally (I think that has been increased to 90 days) although as I understand it I think, you could call customer service to restore service to the sim card perhaps with a different number and get your credit back.

Then there is what the French providers pull and this is one place perhaps the eu could do some good...if you buy a €15 recharge, for example, one month and then they steal your credit and six months later the sim card expires...no amount of making calls or sending sms keeps it alive and since the only way foreigners can recharge is with recharge slips from the carrier (although SFR can recharge with vodafone slips provided you are in a vodafone country) it is hard to keep the card alive if you desire retaining the number and sim card.

Of course, it must be added, that for Americans travelling to the UK, Virgin Mobile is far from the bargain it used to be. Their price to call North America from the UK was 20p/minute which once upon a time was a good price compared say to Vodafone (which still charges, I believe, £1/minute to call North America) with their local UK rate of 15p/minute for first five minutes of use each day and then dropping to 5p per minute...ever since they instituted the 10p minimum per call that rate is no longer the bargain it once was.....and of course there are now far cheaper alternatives to calling North America from the UK (Mobile World, Orange Call Abroad, and the T Mobile service with YourCall). But for some strange reason, I do try to keep the sim card alive.

[Motel75]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

...as noted the value of roaming in the US is absolutely not to make calls but to be able to keep it alive cheaply...

Then there is what the French providers pull and this is one place perhaps the eu could do some good...

Of course, it must be added, that for Americans travelling to the UK, Virgin Mobile is far from the bargain it used to be...

Agree with everything said. I suspect the extreme roaming costs in the US are just part of the insular phone-company "gotcha" mentality and a failure to notice what a revenue source roaming is elsewhere. (For example, on all the major landline carriers, you will pay $4 a minute to call Europe -- you must order a monthly "package" to drop this down to 10-20 cents, which is itself not particularly cheap. I discovered this at my sister's house after checking my German voicemail several times ended up costing me $140!)

France suffers from having a market without a great deal of competition and a big dominant incumbent (France Telecom/Orange) that can dictate terms to newcomers, and weak competition from "cash cows" (SFR, Bouyges) belonging to national conglomerates that aren't otherwise telecommunications heavyweights, who clearly have no interest in rocking the boat (despite --or perhaps causing -- France being the only mobile market in Western Europe that still has a lot of potential growth, with relatively low penetration and use of value-added services, especially SMS). It's always amazing to me how competitive (and thus so much better from the consumer perspective) the German market is nowadays, when it was in much the same position as France's a decade ago.

As for Virgin, I don't know exactly why they instituted the 10p minimum; I don't think it was due to rising costs from using T-Mobile as their base network. I imagine it has more to do with Virgin a) introducing postpaid accounts and thus wanting to make its prepaid offer seem less attractive and b) becoming part of what is essentially an expanded NTL, a much less "cool" company than VM was when it launched. I find it surprising that, far from continuing to innovate, Virgin has left its price list exactly the same as it was when it launched (aside from the minimum charge of first 5p in 2004 and now 10p and the new restrictions on which calls count toward the first 5 minutes of each day, which is now only standard landlines and other VM numbers). They could have offset this with lower calls to other networks or something. As it is, I generally recommend T-Mobile now instead (as you can place international calls for 3p using a dialthrough service).