Strange Int.l Roaming Agreements

[AndreA]

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/roa_ciac.shtml

Atlantique Cellulaire (A-Cell)

Roaming Partners
Lithuania OMNITEL GSM 900
United States Farmers Cellular Telephone Inc GSM 850/1900

Only Lithuania and "Farmer Cellular"? What kind of customer they have? :blink:

[andy]

I found one with even fewer

"SPM Telecom has not declared any active roaming agreements with other network operators."

this is a quite young operator. They do mostly have few or no roaming agreements.

[Stu]

Last I looked, North Korea had no roaming agreements and it was illegal to even bring your foreign mobile into the country.

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/roa_kpnt.shtml

I guess there goes my vacation in Pyongyang.

With respect to the prior post, Farmer's mobile by the way has no roaming agreement. Apparently it is a one way agreement with Ivory Coast.

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/roa_usfc.shtml

[AndreA]

Originally Posted by Stu

Last I looked, North Korea had no roaming agreements and it was illegal to even bring your foreign mobile into the country.

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/roa_kpnt.shtml

I guess there goes my vacation in Pyongyang.

Aobut North Korea and cellphone:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1215/p07s01-woap.html

from the December 15, 2004 edition

New agent of change in N. Korea: cellphones
The rising use of illegal cellphones is connecting more people in the isolated country to the outside world.
By Donald Kirk | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

SEOUL ? In a country where nearly every facet of society is controlled, North Korean authorities are encountering a new foe: the cellphone.

Douglas Shin, a Korean-American minister who has been campaigning for human rights in North Korea, sees the emerging cellphone "revolution" as paralleling, if not abetting, budding dissent against the government.

"At first cellphones worked on a narrow band of land along the Chinese border," says Mr. Shin. "Now they can penetrate a great distance."

Often, he says, cellphone users must climb a hill or mountain to use them, but still he says it's possible to convey messages that previously would never have penetrated the barriers of a state that bars normal international mail and ordinary telephone calls for all but a privileged few.

Many observers say the fact that anyone can hold such long-distance conversations in North Korea could spell trouble for the country's leader, Kim Jong Il.

Can you hear me now?

Shin predicts the US government may even use the spread of cellphones to help bring about regime transformation, if not change in North Korea. He predicts that the US in the next two or three years will begin sending cellphones into North Korea, just as it now plans to penetrate the North by smuggling in small radios capable of receiving Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, both official US stations.

It was shortly after the rail disaster last April in the town of Ryongchon, just 10 miles south of the Yalu River border with China, that the government imposed a ban on all cellphones. North Korean officials have suggested that the ban was intended to stop saboteurs from plotting against the North Korean regime. Kim - whose train had sped through Ryongchon shortly before two trains collided and blew up, killing several hundred people - is widely believed to have been the target.

"If possible, Kim wants mobile phones to disappear in North Korea," says Nishioka Tsutomu, a professor of modern Korean studies at Tokyo Christian University. "But North Korean people do not have enough food. To trade on the black market in China, it is essential to have a mobile phone."

Despite the ban, North Koreans have been using cellphones more than ever, according to visitors to the region. Whether crossing the border legally on official business or illegally to procure food and other vital supplies, they routinely rent or purchase phones on the Chinese side, then turn them off and hide them from border guards as they return.

Cellphones by now are in common use in Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the Yalu River from Dandong, the major Chinese center through which China does much of its trade with the North. They're also widely used along the Tumen River border in the east, and advances in technology now mean callers can occasionally reach contacts as far south as the capital, Pyongyang.

On again, off again

It was only last year that North Korea legalized cellphones, at least among the elite in the capital, after they had been in use illegally for several years. Now that they are illegal again, the only people who can use them legally are high-level officials and the political police.

"People make calls mostly for business," says Kim Kwang Tae, a South Korean journalist who recently visited Dandong, "but some use them for reunions of family members." Indeed, he says, those who have cellphones lend them, for a fee, to North Koreans eager to call relatives who have fled to China - or made it to South Korea at the time of the Korean War more than half a century ago.

"I've called North Koreans on cellphones from Japan," says Professor Tsutomu. "We talked about 10 minutes each time." The conversations "were secret," says Tsutomu, a critic of North Korea's regime. "I cannot say what we discussed."

Although most cellphone calls would probably not compromise security, some cellphone callers are voicing the kind of dissent that could land them in a North Korean prison. "Some people spread some negative news to outside people," says Kim. "One Chinese businessman who was living in Pyongyang said reform will not make much difference unless the leadership changes."

Dissemination of such views - not to mention actual coordination among factions plotting against the government - could pose a threat to a regime already roiled by recent high-level defections and purges, say South Korean analysts.

Kim Jong Il himself has been absent from public view for three months - prompting speculation that he's feeling insecure as he resists pressure for another round of six-party talks (with the US, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea) on the North's nuclear program.

Kim Moon Soo, a conservative member of South Korea's National Assembly, is quick to make a connection between the cellphone revolution and a real one.

"I'm aware many defectors and refugees are using cellphones," he says. "North Korea has banned the use of cellphones, but since you can hide them easily, and many Chinese use them, it's not easy to detect them."

Clearly, "something strange is going on in North Korea," says the legislator. "A lot of North Koreans are not happy under dictatorship and are not well off, so loyalty for Kim Jong Il's regime has lessened, and they are beginning to yearn for the outside world. The leadership is having a hard time controlling people through food distributions, prison camps, and executions."

Under the circumstances, he says, "cellphones are a threat for the leadership."

and
http://devmike.com/blog/archives/200...T13_49_42.html

03.11.2005 13:49
North Korea: crackdown on border security and cellphone usage

Borders can be a touchy point for Communist regimes. East Germany, of the Berlin Wall and the most heavily armed border in the world back in the 1980s, began to totter when in 1989 the Hungarians started allowing refugees asylum and transit to the West. (Oddly, the Hungarian Prime Minister is currently visiting Seoul and is talking about boosting economic ties.)

Now, the North Korean-Chinese border is causing problems for Pyongyang: N. Korea launches harsh crackdown:

[T]wo North Koreans were shot to death in public [on February 28] on charge of smuggling North Korean women into China, according to a Seoul-based online radio service run by defectors from the communist nation. ...

According to North Korean defectors and intelligence sources in Seoul, human trafficking is rampant in North Korea for sex trade and labor. ...

So far this year, North Korea has executed more than 60 citizens to warn its people against committing any "anti-republic" behaviors, such as illegal border crossing and information leakage, according to [the Seoul-based Headquarters for Protection of North Korean Defectors].

The article points out that 'North Korea amended its criminal code last year increasing penalties for expressing criticism of the government and other "anti-state" crimes. The revision, the fifth since 1950, also calls for tougher regulation on new crimes caused by infiltration of outside information.' And now the regime is restricting cellphone use:

Many North Koreans, including border peddlers and border guards, have Chinese cell phones, and they easily contact South Koreans with them in the border areas. ...

Chinese communication firms, which have rapidly expanded their cell phone services, recently installed relay stations along the border with North Korea, which has kindled a cell phone boom in North Korea.

The Chinese devices are charged using pre-paid phone cards, and cost some 400 Chinese yuan (less than $50) for three month's use.

About the statement that the DPRK is banning and confiscating cellphones, there isn't any elaboration.

US SecState Rice will visit the South on Saturday March 19 and Sunday March 20, Xinhuanet reports the ROK's Foreign Ministry as saying.


Anyway a friend of mine (an important journalist) went to North Korea 2 years ago with a official italian delegation and they had international roaming on their sim. They had simply to declare their imsi and number just for the trip.

[gmmour]

The fact that they had international roaming in North Korea by declaring their IMSI and phone number probably has nothing to do with their native provider, since there is no provider I know that has roaming agreements with North Korea...

So incoming calls are probably not an option, unless the North routes the incoming calls to their roaming visitors as if they were coming from e.g. China (i.e. as if those roamers where roaming on a network that has an actual roaming agreement with the roamers' native network).

For outgoing calls now, it is known that GSM phones can be tricked to "think" that they're connected to their Home network, since there is no authentication of the network to the phone (on 3GSM this is solved and USIMs also verify the authenticity of the network they are connected to, but there is no 3GSM in N. Korea anyway).

Anyway, it is very weird to hear that one can have roaming in N. Korea. For outgoing calls, this is possible with "tricking" phones to believe they're on their home network (of course this will actually mean that North Korean towers transmit the MNCs of all possible networks of current visitors in the country), but with incoming calls, this needs the cooperation of North Korea with a network (most probably a chinese one) that has a roaming agreement with the roamer's home network... I do think that it is not inside the Chinese networks' roaming agreement terms with foreign networks, to offer this virtual roaming to people visiting North Korea.