Date: 2007-09-23 17:19 Subject: How to Travel without "Roaming" Security: Public Tags: blognation, martyn davies, maxroam, sim4travel

SIM4travel are among the best known (at least in the UK) in the “roaming SIM” business, or in other words, SIM cards you put in your mobile when travelling in order to sidestep excessive cross-border roaming charges from our cellcos. SIM4travel first entered my consciousness through British Airways, which now sells the SIMs on-board their aircraft, but they now have a lot of UK outlets including high street shops WH Smith’s and Dixons. Their latest partnership is with Expedia travel, which is giving away a SIM4Travel card with booked holidays from Expedia.



The roaming-SIM business has grown pretty fast, and google will reveal at least 20 companies that offer essentially the same product, all at pretty similar rates. A lot of the companies involved have been in the calling card business for years, and in essence the business is really the same, being all about least-cost routing to get competitive call rates for each country. It’s surprisingly low-tech too, in many cases not even using technologies like VoIP, but simply making calls using the PSTN. Most of the SIM-roamers are using a callback technique, where two calls are originated centrally from their network (so your cellphone takes an inbound call instead of making an outbound one) and then joined together (“tromboned”) for the duration of the call. Because it’s cheaper to terminate an inbound call then to initiate a long distance call, the call cost is cheaper, and some of this saving can be passed to the customer.

There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, call-setup is not always seamless, as the callback does require some functionality from the cellco that your are roaming with. In some places, it just doesn’t work, and even when it does work, it’s not quite as easy as making a “native” outbound call using GSM. Some recent efforts (notably Jajah and more recently Gizmo) have tried to make call setup a bit more seamless by using the data channel of the phone initiate the call, rather than rely on the tricky callback procedure.



The other problem is numbering. Many of these roaming SIMs give you a new number, which has often been a number in Estonia, Liechtenstein or Iceland. This is a psychological barrier to people calling you, since we are conditioned to avoid calling other countries. Interestingly, it seems that SIM4travel have stopped issuing these numbers, and now seem to be allocating UK mobile numbers. We haven’t seen the full story yet, but MAXroam from Cubic Telecom launches this week, and this is also a service along the same lines. MAXroam was shown to some acclaim last week at the TechCrunch40 conference.

Recently, the EU introduced new regulation limiting the roaming charges that cellcos can levy on their customers. This good for customers, but paradoxically bad for companies like SIM4travel and MAXroam, since lower mainstream call costs means that we have fewer reasons for buying a roaming SIM, at least for travel among the EU countries. It’s notable that the regulation doesn’t talk about SMS though, so this is still a reason for owning a roaming SIM, and avoiding billshock.

First published at Blognation.com