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Originally Posted by DRNewcomb
Japan is just an issue of having the SIM in the right type phone. Korea (South) is pretty much the same story, but today you have to rent the phone at the ariport. Tomorrow, your WCDMA-2100 phone will probably be fine. There are only a few places in S. & Cent. America where you would not be welcome to roam with an O2 SIM & quad-band phone. Not sure that I can think of even one.
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Mobal, O2, Etc.
Q. I like this idea. I looked on mobal.com and found this product, is this the O2 sim you were talking about?
A. Yes. It is the card that I am talking about. The company is reselling services on the 02 network. Roadpost.com offers a competing service that is or was on the 02 network. I haven?t looked at them seriously in 2 years. Here is a link to their service.
http://www.roadpost.com/cell_phone/buy_a_w...phone/world.asp
Call Forwarding
Q. Call fowarding is a huge part of this puzzle. I called Cingular and they cannot foward calls to international numbers. I checked out voicestick but this seems to be catered to people who use their laptops as VOIP devices. Also we would like to keep his current number. Is there a service that fowards your current number to an international number?
A. There are numerous companies which will give you a US telephone number which will forward to a foreign mobile phone. Voicestick bills itself as a VOIP company, but they will happily take your money to give you a local phone number which is hard forwarded to a foreign mobile. I have a US number hard forwarded to a mobile here in Dubai. It works fine.
Hint: Call Cingular and add ?fast forward? to his account if he is on Cingular Orange (e.g. not a grandfathered ATT plan). For US$2.99 a minute, he will have unlimited call forwarding minutes to another US number (e.g. your 02 SIM).
Two SIMs or 1
Q. Although the two sim card approach sounds like the best bet, I still have some questions: Is it better to get a pre-paid sim from Orange or o2, or from a world sim company like yackiemobile? Do any pre-paids exist where data is also included? Do pre-paids have their own voicemail box? Also would a monthly plan without contract from Orange or o2 that had international roaming on it be more beneficial than pre-paid?
A. Here at Prepaidgsm, we love the prepaid SIMs such as Geodessa, Riing, or Yackie here. This forum exists for tight wads like ourselves who pay our own roaming bill (me), or where we are low enough on the corporate ladder that people still scrutinize your roaming bill (my wife).
In our house, we want to talk as much as we want to whom we want and always have a cheaper roaming bill than everyone else in the company so that we are never red flagged and so that our overall numbers are in line with everyone else?s even when you factor in a nice dinner here or not staying in the Cock Roach Inn there. Our theory has always been to shop prices as aggressively with the company?s money as our own. To me have my US mobile ring in Dubai at US$0.10 a minute (my way) versus US$2.99 a minute (Cingular?s way) is worth a SIM card swap or setting a call forward in the airport lounge prior to take off.
These SIMs work well and they work cheap and with a good degree of reliability, but they are not the ?gold standard.? The prepaid SIMs mostly use a variant of a callback service. You dial your destination number. The call does not complete and the server on the other end calls you back with a connection to your destination number. Many of these services offer free incoming calls in a number of countries, or discounted prices (e.g. Yackie Mobile and iHOP). Yackie mobile charges US$0.25 a minute to receive incoming calls in almost every country. Since they give you a US number (as opposed to a foreign mobile number), the quarter a minute is only somewhat higher than the best forward rates we can come up with to an Icelandic SIM.
Because of the two stage dialing, your call completion rate is not quite as high. It is over 80%, but it is not 100%. Say for example, you are standing in Shanghai China on Friday at 8pm trying to complete a call. The network will be over-congested. A two stage like I?m suggesting requires a connection to the local network, a connection to a foreign server to validate the call, an incoming call successfully terminating to the Chinese network, and then to your phone. You have doubled your chances of a call not going through.
It has been my experience that in network congestion situations, incoming calls get sent to voicemail far more often than outgoing calls have a problem. I think carriers know that people will not be as annoyed or certain when an incoming call gets missed as when they get a ?network failure? message on their mobile trying to call out. Unless you have the phone in your hand staring at the thing waiting for a call, you are rarely 100% positive that you didn?t miss the call. I suspect that network prioritization reflects this reality.
This prepaid carriers are often MVNO?s who negotiate their own roaming agreement. An MVNO is a company which functions as a carrier but doesn?t own their own towers. (Virgin Mobile, Boost, etc. are examples of MVNO?s in the US). If they are not relying on the negotiating prowess of a company like 02, they might decide that it is not worth their negotiating for roaming agreements in Equatorial Guyana. Even where they can negotiate an agreement, these companies might decide that the rates are simply too high. For example, I don?t believe any of these companies have bothered with Bahamas which charges crazy high rates and the local phone company is apparently not an easy company to work with.
Don?t get me wrong. These SIMs are a great value. That is what I use and recommend to most people. You have asked us to prioritize breadth of roaming agreements, reliability of service, and ability to data roam ahead of price. That is what we have done. If your president would care to carry a second mobile or engage in SIM swapping, etc., we can suggest alternatives that will greatly reduce the price of roaming, but that is not what you asked for.
Data Roaming
You have expressed a strong interest in data roaming. It is my belief that GPRS roaming is coming on many of the prepaid SIMs and there are limited implementations already (e.g. Yackie will data roam in Israel). Mobal will turn on data services on request. By default they are turned off.
Japan, and Korea
I've used a WCDMA phone in Japan in February with a foreign SIM and it works fine. I gave a Motorola 3g handset to a close friend who uses it in Japan once a month on T-Mobile DE. It works fine as well.
In the back of my head, I think that he had done the same in Korea. Rudolf (my friend) has also told me that a 3g handset works better in China than a standard GSM phone. I'm not sure if it is because they have UMTs riding on the China Unicom CDMA network as well or because there is less band congestion there.
Stu
PS: I wrote this response in Word and pasted it over. Some of the formatting didn't paste over and this might interfere a little between with the presentation. Sorry!