Major Roaming Reductions Coming-From NY Times July 6 - Front Page Business Section

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

Actually there are already similar solutions in some countries like Saudi Arabia and Mauritius, where inbound roaming customers may subscribe to a prepaid plan of the local MNO using their existing SIM card. After subscription and topping up credit (with local topup vouchers of course) roamers can call at the local MNO's rates (deducted from the local prepaid credit) and will be assigned a local number.

This sounds a lot like the "Zebra roaming" proposal I saw published many years ago. The one disadvantage is that it uses only the SIM ID number for account validation with no encryption. I have roamed on a carrier in Indonesia who assigned me a temporary local number for incoming calls. I forwarded my US main incoming number to this local number and, as we all know, it's pretty easy to turn a cheap incoming line into a cheap outgoing line. It worked quite well.