After United Mobile

[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.