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.
September 23rd, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Cubic Telecom and Maxroam compared to other offers…
Now it’s nearly a week since Cubic Telecom presented their new product Maxroam at TechCrunch 40 (TC40), but still they don’t reveal their real prices which should be found here. Still Maxroam says “Rates published soon” while Cubic Telecom’s websi…
September 23rd, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Great post, Martyn, thanks. Clear explanations, especially re SMS not being covered under EU regulation. Didn’t know that!
September 24th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Thanks Neville, good to hear from you. I was just reading your comments about the iPhone launch and the Cocoon..
September 27th, 2007 at 3:31 am
[…] How to Travel without “Roaming” 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 […]
September 27th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Maxroam seems to have launched at last, and looks rather reminiscent of another product on the market for some time, with a landline number that diverts to the SIM at rates that seem to me pretty much on a par with incoming roaming charges on the new Eurotariff.
Anyone with one of the other SIMs on the market could set up similar forwarding relatively easily, and cheaper. Or perhaps even this one if they knew the underlying SIM number …
There are other new launches in this field, either recent or very soon.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Martin, nice post, we set up a service where we allow you to comapare and review all roaming sim providers, after the callkey failure we decided to list and revie wthe providers.
http://www.roamingsims.com
The main feature sit aht you can see that even after the eurotariff it’s still possbile to save money using a roaming sim.
Maxroam work on an isreali mobile number.
March 24th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Oh dear, Rune, your spammer operation really is slowing down.
And the ex-Callkey SIMs are going again, although some resellers have switched to other brands, or won’t you notice any of this for another 3 months yet?
There are some other new entrants, together with others who have been around a couple of years or so.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Andy what do you mean?
Ex Call-key sims? There is united mobile, ekit, Call-key, and a few others who supply white label cards. We list as many as we can, however if you noticed some of these companies don’t even reply to emails, which is why we don’t put them up.
Both Max Roam and Sim4Travel are the most popular cards on http://www.roamingsims.com
if there are more suppliers with cards that want to sell their sims via us they are more than welcome.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
What do I mean?
You tour the internet posting your spam, but seem to have got here months late, at about the speed of an ant crossing a country.
Just because these other providers won’t make affiliate referral arrangements with your company, that hardly means that they are insignificant enough for you to pretend that you’re comparing all of them.
I notice though that you have recently added a couple more SIMs on there, but they aren’t all UM, ekit and ex-Callkey as you suggest
And you don’t know enough about the products anyway. Although Maxroam uses an Orange Israel SIM card, like its partner Celtrek, it does not use an Israeli phone number as you suggested earlier, but landline DID(s) in the user’s choice of country/ies.
It isn’t absolute that the SIM and the phone number are from the same country. Hop mobile had a Monaco number on a Ghanaian SIM, and there is an operation with a UK number on a Hong Kong SIM. Or German SIMs with dual ID apparently including a small island in Europe but not in Europe
Your posts are spam
You can’t even list all the oprions for ordinary UK SIMs. You’ve omitted the best option on O2 UK, which would cost your example business traveller £35, and your roaming costs for Vodafone stretch credibility by assuming every phone call is one minute long.
Would we learn that for example calls home from Cyprus could cost 9 pence a minute on a SIM you don’t even list? No, you suggest only Telestial
And you don’t even consider discussing the cost of forwarding incoming calls to the roaming SIM. This is something that Maxroam and Celtrek have in their favour, as the user is taking the cost, not loading it on the people calling them.
Some roaming SIMs come from some UK network’s inclusive minutes, but there’s no chance whatsoever that Rune/Briing/Victorconnect would bother to make any effort to tell us that