After United Mobile

[MATHA531]

My head is spinning from all this. I grant you I'm not a geek but interested in good value for my money. I never suspected that if I buy an international sim putting money up front and basically only use it to receive calls in those areas where they advertise it's free to receive I am violating any tariff or something like that. Is that what is being said here? Isn't this similar to a bait and switch plan when restrictions such as this are buried?

And it's almost something like I once read from an executive at one USA gsm carrier. He was asked how you could afford to give people unlimited use at whatever the rate was at that point. He said because the average person who uses unlimited never (or almost never) reaches the level he or she would if they used prepaid. It's far more profitable for them to give unlimited say for $80/month rather than 500 minutes @ 15¢/minute and that most people even with unlimited never gets to 500 minutes!

I bought a United Mobile card, put up 25€ or whatever up front...they have the €25, use it mostly to receive for free, they have €25 they wouldn't have if I haven't bought the card and also don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Chalk me up as one confused hombre.

[snaimon]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

My head is spinning from all this. ...
I bought a United Mobile card, put up 25€ or whatever up front...they have the €25, use it mostly to receive for free, they have €25 they wouldn't have if I haven't bought the card and also don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Of COURSE they get the termination fees.

Leads me to believe that their partner carriers and - or whoever doles out the "termination fees" have changed the rules, formula or whatever - and - or their business model for revenue streams and costs needed serious revisions.

We do know the +423 dialing costs skyrocketed. Probably because the loophole they found was in the sweetspot. When providers (ATT, etc) found out they were bleeding to death from the sweetspot termination fees, they cranked up the rates to cover their costs. This, in turn, whacked inbound revenues from UM. They then added UM+ (UK) hoping for the same stream. None of that panned out, so they (UM) are now down and out. In addition, they never reached the volume of clients they had hoped for. The Germans have lots of reasons for NOT buying into the +423 mobile #s. Mainly too inconvenient for their friends to cal a foreign #. Probably the same for all folks. There were several firms that marketed Riiing, etc., but I doubt they did much advertising. Who wants to go with a newcomer, let alone from +423? Might as well have been from Outer Mongolia. Sorry all you Outer Mongolians out there.

Now, poor customer service, trying to generate revenues any way they can like offering outdated phones, offering bonus for refills. What next? Will they be selling a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge? Does not look very good at all if you ask me.

Use up your balances, guys and gals!

Of course, this is all speculation on my part.

Stan

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

...don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Termination fees to Jersey Telecom's GSM-network are £ 0,08008 (day), £ 0,04368 (night) and £ 0,02968 (weekend). In Euros, which I suppose is the most important currency in terms of roaming-expenses for UM, this is € 0,034 / 0,05 / 0,09 per minute. If you consider, that JT surely keeps part of the termination income to cover the costs for their very own network, do you believe the remain is enough to terminate a call in a roaming network? I'm convinced UM lost money with every incoming call terminated outside of Jersey and despite of the recently introduced connection fee they still do if the call lasts a bit longer.
The main problem of all those roaming discounters is, that there are too few potential customers and the regulation of roaming tariffs by the EU has reduced their number. With the further decline of voice roaming tariffs in the EU and the new caps for data roaming tariffs including SMS they are successively becoming less attractive. All in all I think the whole roaming discount segment will disappear sooner or later.

[MATHA531]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

Termination fees to Jersey Telecom's GSM-network are £ 0,08008 (day), £ 0,04368 (night) and £ 0,02968 (weekend). In Euros, which I suppose is the most important currency in terms of roaming-expenses for UM, this is € 0,034 / 0,05 / 0,09 per minute. If you consider, that JT surely keeps part of the termination income to cover the costs for their very own network, do you believe the remain is enough to terminate a call in a roaming network? I'm convinced UM lost money with every incoming call terminated outside of Jersey and despite of the recently introduced connection fee they still do if the call lasts a bit longer.
The main problem of all those roaming discounters is, that there are too few potential customers and the regulation of roaming tariffs by the EU has reduced their number. With the further decline of voice roaming tariffs in the EU and the new caps for data roaming tariffs including SMS they are successively becoming less attractive. All in all I think the whole roaming discount segment will disappear sooner or later.

I think youhave it and it does sort of jive with my thinking. I go back with this oh about 5 years and joined this forum when Ryan air introduced a revolutionary new product. It failed miserably but we started discussing it. At the same time, just about, United Mobile introduced a product called riing which eventually it merged into its original United Mobile card. It was, as we all know, based in Liechtenstein and featured the free reception of calls throughout Europe (whether in the eu or not) east of Russia as well as places like South Africa, Australia and a couple of others. It was a god send. Top that off with services from entities such as Callback World and Enlinea and, as I said somewhere else on the forum, I was in heaven. I did a long trip through Eastern Europe (Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) for about 2 weeks and this is what I had...I had free reception of calls...I had call forwarding from my US landline and at the time calls to Liechtenstein were 10¢/minute with a 1¢ termination fee to Liechtenstein mobiles which made it 11¢/minute for a call to be forwarded to me and then using callbackworld to make calls home, the fee when all was said and done was about 12¢/minute. Who could ask for more. I bragged about it and Effendi scolded me for what I was doing.

That was before the eurotariffs. Then we saw the termination fees to Liechtenstein mobiles skyrocket to as much as 50¢ ore more per minute killing the call forwarding and also the use of cbw. I then started looking at the Isle of Man sim cards and eventually two summers ago, UM was forced to introduce the Jersey product with the +44 number; termination fees for call forwarding were regular UK termination fees (on my carrier that's about 27¢/minute) but using enlinea or cbw on these sims for outward calling incur fees around 50¢/minute. In the interim I was getting around it as late as this past summer with O9 because enlina was only charging 16¢/minute whether I was calling out or receiving via their US toll free number even though termination fees to icelandic mobile was very high and so were termination fees to Estonian numbers making Travelsim I gues it is not really viable.

But the rub here is that the people most affected by all this are North Americans because of the way the system is set up. Our gsm carriers in the USA charge 99¢/minute or more to roam throughout Europe, calling out and receiving. And of course they have that rip off where if a call goes into voicemail, they're able to nail you with two fees. Of course when I argue when T Mobile USA pulls this crap because if I'm roaming on T Mobile UK and T mobile UK charges T Mobile US a fee, then all they're doing is transferring money from their right pocket to their left pocket as both are fully owned by Deutses telecom...of course on the way from the left pocket to the right pocket, they take a stop at my pocket!

So, as this has gone on what's left. Well most of my European travel is to visit friends in London....well we all know what's going on with British sims...they're literally giving them away and I do believe that on the whole using the eurotariffs while on the continent are really not all that bad and wonder if my UM+, now with the 0,19€ fee to receive is really economical.

[monkeyboy]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

The main problem of all those roaming discounters is, that there are too few potential customers and the regulation of roaming tariffs by the EU has reduced their number. With the further decline of voice roaming tariffs in the EU and the new caps for data roaming tariffs including SMS they are successively becoming less attractive. All in all I think the whole roaming discount segment will disappear sooner or later.

Of course a big killer of the market is VOIP. Services like Skype are simply fantastic and dirt cheap/essentially free. So as long as you have Internet access, it is really pointless to make your calls any other way. It doesn't solve all int'l roaming phone usage, but it easily diverts 50% of the usage or more.

[bbob]

Originally Posted by monkeyboy

Of course a big killer of the market is VOIP. Services like Skype are simply fantastic and dirt cheap/essentially free. So as long as you have Internet access, it is really pointless to make your calls any other way. It doesn't solve all int'l roaming phone usage, but it easily diverts 50% of the usage or more.

I agree voip is a good alternative but 50% no way, maybe 10%. When on the road in your car you can't really use voip. You have to find an access point first and range is limited.
Sure some hotels offer free wireless but the more expensive ones just let you pay for internet, so gone are the savings.

No voip is nice but when travelling you want to call and be called anywhere and that is the biggest limit of voip through internetaccess.

[f300]

I am both sorry for United Mobile and mildly annoyed. I understand they are probably caught between a rock and a hard place and they can't possibly make a viable business with free incoming.
But this goes both ways. One of the great features of United Mobile/Riiing was that you were called for free in so many countries. For this we were willing to put up with unreliable network, different (and expensive) phone number and poor support resembling an "apartment company" not a phone operator.
But now for EU where a big chunk of the "roaming market" is (because countries are small and so easy to cross borders) because of regulations most prices are capped now by law (and will be even lower in the future). So even if you take the most inefficient "local" SIM and use it in roaming in EU you can still get some calls out of a 15 EUR recharge.
For more exotic places people adapt. You have your "normal" mobile with you but use it only for emergencies because it's expensive (but that's no surprise, it has been like this for as long there was roaming and there was a time when there was NO roaming at any price). The rest you can easily take care over skype and such.
Even if disappointing there's no big tragedy that UM went this way. In the end maybe I'll even feel better, I'll take my UM+ number out from my business card (it was anyway confusing people and the SIM was off most of the time), I'll take the SIM out of my wallet and not have to decide which one to use (or whether I should carry two phones) when I travel. Good riddance.

[adam917]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

My head is spinning from all this. I grant you I'm not a geek but interested in good value for my money. I never suspected that if I buy an international sim putting money up front and basically only use it to receive calls in those areas where they advertise it's free to receive I am violating any tariff or something like that. Is that what is being said here? Isn't this similar to a bait and switch plan when restrictions such as this are buried?

And it's almost something like I once read from an executive at one USA gsm carrier. He was asked how you could afford to give people unlimited use at whatever the rate was at that point. He said because the average person who uses unlimited never (or almost never) reaches the level he or she would if they used prepaid. It's far more profitable for them to give unlimited say for $80/month rather than 500 minutes @ 15¢/minute and that most people even with unlimited never gets to 500 minutes!

I bought a United Mobile card, put up 25€ or whatever up front...they have the €25, use it mostly to receive for free, they have €25 they wouldn't have if I haven't bought the card and also don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Chalk me up as one confused hombre.

You should remember that we in the US often get unlimited night-time (usually running from as early as 19:00 and ending the next morning, sometimes as late as 09:00) & weekend minutes to any domestic phone, and some people really take advantage of that. One person I know uses around 10'000 (yes, ten thousand) night/weekend minutes and maybe 200 daytime minutes every month. If they had to pay for each minute, the price per minute would work out to an extremely cheap eight tenths of one cent on our current plan, even less on months which more time were used. I don't know how tarriffs are in most other countries but I bet that even having unlimited incoming calls isn't as good in the end when you are used to using a mobile phone like you would a land-line. The average price per minute is probably much higher. We got rid of our landline due to the mobile rates being that good.