Telna Again?

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

This is personal...I don't like postpaid...if the sim card is lost, and I've heard many cases of lost sim cards say by a son or daughter who may not even realize the sim card has been lost, you are responsible for all calls made till its reported lost.

There is that. With a prepaid you can easily loan the card to someone and know the exact extent of your risk. The solution for the card being lost is to use a PIN and don't loan the card out. I've traveled extensively and never lost a SIM but maybe I've just been lucky (or very careful). I have had phones saved by using a shoestring as belt lanyard attached to the phone. Having worked on ships so long, I tend to keep important things attached so they can't fall overboard.

[Bossman]

Very good point. They are postpaid. So, like other postpaids, one has to factor in taxes. Just looked at my last bill from them for when I used it in Jamaica last year. Taxes were 23% of the total bill.
-----------------------------------------
Usage for telna Mobile (XXX) XXX - XXXX
Total call usage $8.94
Il state excise tax $0.670
Federal universal service fund $1.261
Federal trs fund $0.102
Simplified muni telecomm tax $0.574
Il state imf $0.048
Total taxes and surcharges $2.65

Total charges $11.60

Originally Posted by rfranzq

Telna's claim to fame is that it is post paid. $19.00 is the price one pays for that. For some people that is doable and OK and others no so much.

[GadgetKen]

They have the new Telna Mobile rates posted; a lot of the web pages say "Beta." Rates look very good for some countries but rather high for others (would rather use my Digicel sim in Bermuda or my ekit Simple Calling sim in the Cayman Islands for better rates). Still, depending on someone's itinerary, it could be a good value. Intriguing that the Telna sim will auto-select direct dial or call-back mode depending on carrier and country.

US rates are very reasonable at US$.05/minute incoming and US$.08/minute outgoing; primary US carrier is T-Mobile. Canada rates are rather high. Could be a good alternative for someone wanting a US postpaid sim card that can roam internationally without buying a huge bucket of minutes directly from a US carrier every month (whether or not they used them).

When I went through the sign-up form out of curiosity, it came up with a 3U Mobile pop-up message that I didn't sign up successfully (wasn't planning on buying at this time; but wanted to see the options presented). That's a German website under construction. I'm guessing 3U is the back-end provider for services outside North America.

[Bossman]

Has any current customer received the new sim card?

[telnamobile]

Hello,

indeed the telna Mobile service is now open for business again. It took us much longer than expected to have the new service working to our standards, but we believe that it was worth the extra wait.

What has happened during that timeframe (we actually started working on this project about a year and half ago, long before the vendor for the previous service went bankrupt) is that telna is now a licensed mobile operator (1900 Mhz) in Missouri, and a full member of the GSM association (as you can see here: GSM Coverage Maps | United States | Telecom North America Mobile Inc.(telna Mobile) | Coverage and Network Information). We built our own GSM core network, own all the equipment involved, manufacture our own SIM cards, develop the software that resides on the SIM cards, negotiate our own roaming agreements and basically control everything, so that there are no more vendors involved who go bankrupt and put the service to halt.

At the moment, the service includes the following:

- US or Canadian phone number (UK numbers will be added soon). We can port in existing phone numbers. This is not available through the website yet, so if interested, simply contact customer service by email or phone.

- Coverage in 201 countries with low rates including in the USA. You can check the rates here: telna Mobile - Low cost cellular service for international travelers(international sim card for reduced roaming for inbound and outbound calls while abroad)

- Inbound and outbound voice and SMS service. Inside the USA we use direct dialing for outbound calls, and not callback. Other countries use callback at the moment.

- Data service in 138 countries. There is no data service inside USA yet, this will be launched soon.


What will be added in the future:

- Voip service that uses the same phone number and account as the wireless service. This will provide free incoming calls when calls are received through VOIP, and much lower rates when calls go out through VOIP. Actually, we are looking for beta testers for this service, so if you are a telna Mobile customer, and have an Android phone, you can download the telna app in the market and PM me to get SIP credentials. The app makes everything seamless: when you enter a wifi covered area with your phone, calls are routed in and out via Wifi automatically.

- There will be a prepaid version of the service, for those customers who prefer prepaid

- We are continuously negotiating new roaming agreements. As these are launched, rates, in particular data rates, will go down in many countries. In certain countries, we will switch from callback to direct dialing when it is possible to do so at a good price. In some cases, we will reduce the number of networks available in a country, because we will have a specially negotiated rate on one specific network.

To address MATHA531's comment, please note that although the service is sold as a postpaid service, everything is rated in realtime in our billing platform, and we currently have a cap of $300 of monthly usage configured for each customer. When you get close to this cap, customer service will contact you to ensure that the usage is legitimate, before increasing the cap. In addition, there can be separate caps for classes or service, for example we set a 70$ monthly cap on data usage, to make sure that customers don't inadvertently leave a laptop connected to the internet.
In the near future, these values will be available for customers to adjust themselves in mytelna. It will also be possible to entirely block data service (or SMS service) if required. Our goal as a company is to operate a long term, profitable business while trying to help customers save money, so we certainly want to help prevent "billshock" in any way we can.

Bossman: Yes, every former customer whom we were able to contact and confirm that they would like a replacement card, have received their replacement card in the last 2 weeks or so.

GadgetKen: Thank you for mentioning the popup incorrectly showing the "3U" name. 3U Telecom was the former name of Telecom North America prior to 2009. The bug has been corrected.

Please feel free to ask any question you may have.

PS: We also have a wholesale/white-label version of the service and are looking for resellers around the world. Anyone reading this and interested can contact us through Telecom North America, formerly 3U Telecom

[moyaroo]

I got mine about 2 weeks ago and set them up this morning. Telna needed to tweak something in the software, but it was good that they did as I was going to use the phone this weekend . . .

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by Bossman

Has any current customer received the new sim card?

I received a shipping notice. The card is supposed to arrive today.

Originally Posted by Telna

- Voip service that uses the same phone number and account as the wireless service. This will provide free incoming calls when calls are received through VOIP, and much lower rates when calls go out through VOIP. Actually, we are looking for beta testers for this service, so if you are a telna Mobile customer, and have an Android phone, you can download the telna app in the market and PM me to get SIP credentials. The app makes everything seamless: when you enter a wifi covered area with your phone, calls are routed in and out via Wifi automatically.

Would this feature be able to work with other phones that have WiFi & VoIP, such as Nokia S60 phones? It would seem that it could be possible that if a SIP connection was active that calls would automatically route that way rather than via GSM. TruPhone does something like this.

[telnamobile]

Hello,

yes, you can use any phone with a voip client, including Nokia, however you will be responsible to dial outbound calls the correct way (either through the phone's dialer or through the voip client) if the voip client doesn't integrate into the phone's dialer. The only benefit of our client is that it does this automatically, but it only exists on Android at the moment.

For inbound calls, we determine where to route them from the network side, so it doesn't matter which client you use.

[DRNewcomb]

My TelnaMobile SIM arrived today. I dropped it into my Moto V550 and it came right up on T-Mobile. I tried to register it as a Google Voice mobile phone but Google Voice would not recognize the keypad tones needed to enter the verification code. I sent a SMS from Telna to GoogleVoice, which was quickly received but the reverse (Google->Telna) got lost. I tried the SIM in my Nokia E61 and it would not stay registered on either ATT or T-Mobile. I'll try a few more phones later. The neither the PIN nor the PUK are provided with the SIM (AFAICT).

[DRNewcomb]

The SIM went from working to "Emergency Only" to "Unregistered SIM" and back to working again within a few hours. I was eventually able to get Google Voice to hear the DTMF confirmation code to register the number for use with Google Voice. So far, I can send SMS to just about number (smsBug, Google Voice, Cellular South) but have only been able to receive SMS from T-Mobile. I've been told that there is no provision for a SIM PIN, which is somewhat troubling, as I normally use a PIN.

All in all, I'm very hopeful about TelnaMobile. I've been concerned about what I will do after the demise of T-Mobile (one way or another). If TelnaMobile works well it will allow me to retain a viable international roaming capability while allowing me to solve my domestic service problem without having to consider international coverage.

P.S. I was able to receive a SMS from FishText.com