[MATHA531]

I used O9 extensively while in Germany, France and the UK in June and a friend of mine used my O9 sim just during this past week in Italy, Greece and Croatia.

For the most part, it worked well. I prefer using enlinea as the triggering call gives a busy signal and there is no danger of being charged for a call. I had a bit of trouble with CBW in that they use a ringing trigger and several times, even though I disconnected awaiting the callback, the ring led to a quick request for a pin because of cbw's use of foreign (non USA) triggering numbers and it drained my credit on O9 to the point I had to trigger calls using another sim (and enlinea with the busy signal). Since then I have discovered on the cbw my account web site you can set this trigger to a busy signal but enlinea worked fine.

Enlina and cbw tend to work as well or as poorly as each other as apparently they used the same isp to actually complete the calls.

Having said that, enlinea this past July with my friend using my sim in Italy, Greece and Croatia worked adequately..sometimes of course as we have grown to know the callback doesn't cmoplete, other times it ends up in voicemail (we ended up with about 50 calls in vocemail, all the female voice sayng please enter phone number followed by the number sign key now....never go into voicemail anyway. On my end, when a call comes in I can hear a slight delay, I'll answer a question and it takes a bit for the party on the other end to respond...nothing much worse then you often see on television when a commentator interviews some reporter at a remote locatin...voice quality was a bit uneven but for the most part legible.

Rates were as advertised and the toll free service (I have an enlinea toll free number that I can direct to wherever I want) worked well as did cbw pin2dest...the quality of the call on my end (calling the Iceland number) was very good; better than when he called me but I don't know what was going on on his end.

Of course one of the big flaws with O9 is a lack of coverage in Switzerland...this has still not been rectified to the best of my knowledge...just can't understand why there is no O9 service in Switzerland..but other than that (and it is a big problem unfortunately) coverage was good.

Finally, interestingly enough, in a test before sending my friend off with the Icelandic card, I did consider the Estonian travel sim I had. I was able to set the toll free number on enlinea and pin2dest to work but my experience in June was I never got a callback on either cbw or travelsim when trying to use the Estonian card.

Incidentally as you may know, termination fees to the Icelandic and Estonian sim cards are very very high indeed with almost all US carriers, just as high as Liechtenstein is now. The use of the toll free services such as kall8 and voicestick are bad also. However, the toll free services on enlinea and pn2dest on cbw do provide low enough rates to make receiving calls on o9 and travelsim okay via callforwarding (although pin2dest doesn't work off of my mobile's callforwarding...when I try to set it with the delay to enter the pin it doesn't accept the number but the pure toll free numbers do work).....callers will be very reluctant to call you using the naitive icelandic or estonian numbers especially when they see their ld bills!