Further improvements and a great announcement at Maxroam

Next week I will be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and I will take my Maxroam SIM card with me. So outgoing calls to German landlines will cost only €0.38 per minute and incoming calls €0.25, instead of €0.58 and €0.28 which a usual German cell phone provider would charge me. Before last year's regulation these prices where even higher. In some countries I'd still have to pay €2.49 per minute for a local call while roaming. To be reachable in Barcelona I will forward my Berlin office number for free to the UK fixed line number that I have on my Maxroam SIM. I will either use my own ATA for that purpose or a new Maxroam feature.

An outgoing call with Maxroam is a litte bit different from a normal mobile phone call. It doesn't start directly. Instead you see several status messages running over your phone's display, like "calling", "requesting" and then again "calling", before you receive an incoming call with no number. That's Maxroams server calling you. A voice says "connecting, please wait" and contacts the callee. This entire callback system is based on USSD messages. That's a kind of free short messages in GSM networks, which can be sent only between the user's handset and the provider. USSD had been invented to let you check the amount of prepaid minutes on your SIM card for free. Nowadays it's often used as a 'trigger' to invoke independent calling services like Maxroam. Think of it like Jajah, but without the need to pay for mobile data usage for the communication with the server.

The Cubic phone, which can also be had from the company for usage with the Maxroam SIM and for VoIP over Wifi, is so packed with software that there is no space left to secure it with a PIN number. Maxroam's CEO Pat Phelan told me in an interview: "It’s very packed on the operating system and we have had to leave room for the two logging on GUI for the hotspots". In the last quarter the company had lots of backend work going on which now result in further improvements, as Pat Phelan told me in an email:


1. Live billing
We now have full live billing for all users on our backend, make a call, hang up and we instantly display it.

2. Add a local number
As of today we can add local FIXED line numbers to your MAXroam sim from 52 countries. (MAXroam only use fixed line numbers unlike other companies which use international mobile or premium UK mobile numbers where the average users have no knowledge of what it costs to dial the SIM and your friends are just subsidizing your roaming). This list is being added to every day. These numbers begin at €1.05 per month and you can pick up, drop as many as you like, minimum commitment is only a month.

3. Free Call forwarding
When you arrive in your destination sometimes you have access to a hotel room or an office number, we will now allow to forward all your MAXroam numbers totally free to fixed line numbers in a list of 48 countries so you are roaming for ZERO COST.

4. SMS only 5c
Once you log into your MAXroam account we will allow all users to send SMS anywhere in the world from the backend for only 5c per message.


But the most interesting announcement he already made in November, when I asked him in an interview for the German magazine ProFirma about Maxroam's prices compared to other companies like Sunsim, Globalsim or TouristMobile:

Our pricing is only at the beginning, most of these company are just resellers and I don’t mean this as an insult, we are building a global brand here, our aim within 1 year is 20c in and out in Europe and under 10c in the USA. Our next sims will be 128k Java with between 6 and 16 IMSI on each sim depending on your travel arrangements, so you arrive in India, we have an Indian IMSI on your SIM and you roam at discounted rates, we are not depending on other peoples roaming agreement and are at present travelling the planet signing independent roaming agreements.

Under €0.10 in and out? Now that would be a great price for USA, where Maxroam still charges €1.10 or more for incoming and outgoing calls. I can't wait to see these 6 and 16 IMSI SIM cards. That's like taking 16 cell phones with you, each one with a local card. So you don't have to pay for incoming calls.

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 website consists only of a place holder and former price examples have dissappeared.

Sure, they claim that GSM calls are up to 80 per cent cheaper than the roaming rates offered by existing mobile service providers. But that's a usual claim which you can also hear from competing companies such as United Mobile. I would like to compare the prices by myself.

At least Alec Saunders got some numbers from Cubic Telecom's CEO Pat Phelan when they talked one day after TC40:

Calls from one Cubic subscriber to another are free when used in a hotspot. They also come with a MaxRoam SIM with 5 euros of credit. That's the kicker, frankly. The MaxRoam LD rates will make anyone turn their head sharply… for instance, calls in Canada cost .0063 euros. In the US, .0131 euros. In the UK… .011 euros. In addition, you can get a local number wherever you're going, so that when you travel others can call you cheaply as well.

Sounds great, but for which kind of calls do these costs apply? I guess that's just the WiFI rates since the San Francisco Chronicle writes:

You just slip the MAXRoam SIM into your unlocked GSM phone when you travel and then when you make phone calls abroad, it comes out to about 15 cents per minute, thanks to global roaming agreements that Cubic has worked out with operators around the world.

15 Cent is a great price, whether in euro or in dollar, and undercuts for instance United Mobile with its funny mobile numbers from Liechtenstein or Jersey by nearly 50 per cent. Only I would like to see where this rate applies. And why does VentureBeat write that Maxroam "will provide cell phone users with a SIM card that enables global calling for rates between 20 and 30 cents a minute in more than 160 countries"? That's a price difference of up to 100 per cent in two articles from the same day.

Still it's a great idea that Maxroam works also in Wifi hotspots where you don't have to pay two digit cent prices per minutes, but probably about one cent to most countries. Also these prices are not yet published, but I guess that's what Alec Saunders wrote about. The Wifi prices are of course great, but they have to be compared to the Wifi offers from Wifimobile and Truphone. Truphone calls to 40 countries are free until the end of the year, at Wifimobile you get the same for a flat rate price of $15.99 €11.99 £7.99 per month. In both cases you can use your existing cell phone number as caller ID, unless you are from the US or the UK, and don't have to bear the shame of these weird Liechtenstein, Iceland, Jersey, Estonia or the Isle of Man numbers. Wifimobile's new calltrough numbers in 11 countries even let you place calls outside a Wifi area.

Which brings me to Cubic Telecom's most interesting feature to slash roaming costs: Consumers get a single phone number, but can create multiple permanent local numbers for themselves - up to 50 - anywhere around the globe. All calls are forwarded to their Cubic Mobile phone, no matter where the calls originate, at the best rates for the callers. That's a cool idea, but Cubic Telecom is not the first to offer it. Local numbers for global SIMs are the new trend, I wrote two months ago. The German company GlobalSIM started already in july to give local fixed line numbers from 43 countries to their SIM card customers.

Like Nokia, whose Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia Anssi Vanjoki recently said that they "copy with pride" from the iPhone, Cubic Telecom has taken all these available features and squashed them into one product. That's a real accomplishment. They even took an existing phone and and made media like FierceVoip or the San Francisco Chronicle call it the "Cubic Mobile Phone". Although it's the known Pirelli DualPhone DP-L10 which the German VoIP provider Sipgate already sells since january.

But now, dear Pat, I would really like to know the prices per minute.

Skype Founding Investor invests in United Mobile to "deliver a combination of Truphone, Jajah and Skype"

Skype's founding investor Morten Lund is investing in the international mobile network operator United Mobile. That's an international cell phone company, comparable to Roam4Free, GoSIM, BlueSIM, Che Mobil, GlobalSIM, SunSIM, TouristMobile or others, which allows outgoing calls at low rates in over 80 countries and to receive free incoming calls without roaming charges.

Morten Lund seems to brim over with enthusiasm for United Mobile’s business strategy of combining its services with so called Web 2.0 functionality and says:

“The business rationale behind United Mobile’s decision to integrate Web 2.0 features into its service offering is compelling. The organisation’s key objective is to transfer the Skype model to the mobile phone for average Joe who is travelling. United Mobile will deliver a combination of Truphone, Jajah and Skype on a “One SIM card Service”. The company will be a leader in delivering free mobile telephony worldwide. This pioneering new business model will be widely adopted in the world’s leading mobile markets in the near future.”

Free mobile telephony worldwide? That's what we want! At least me and all the VoIP telephony tweakers out there who are always looking for the cheapest way to call.

But what about "Truphone, Jajah and Skype on one SIM card"? Is there something going on between these companies? As far as I know from my professional life, United Mobile would need an authorization to mention the other companies' names in a press release. So where Truphone, Jajah and Skype involved in the press release? Or is United Mobile just name dropping them?

Is there something going on behind the courtain? A dark power forging a new VoIP empire out of these four companies?

As far as I see, United Mobile should have the best rates to terminate international cell phone calls. Truphone, Jajah and Skype could envy them. Also United Mobile has its own SIM cards. It would be very convenient for Truphone, Jajah and Skype if they could start their services from a SIM card, instead from their rather slowly phone client or mobile web page. Also it's obvious that these three minute stealers cannot expect support from mobile incumbents. So it would make sense to cooperate with a worldwide mobile MVNO.

Truphone has just presented their new Multi-SIM capability, which supports travellers who take international SIM cards with them abroad. Calls to their Truphone number will reach them whichever SIM they're using at the time. That's nice, but could be even more convenient. Who wants to always change his SIM card whenever he or she arrives at the Airport? Maybe soon it's not necessary anymore to change the SIM card? When will we see a real TruSIM? When a JajahSIM or a SkypeSIM?

Get out of the closet!

Fellow blogger Moshe Maeir already explained here and here how Jajah's access to Intel's patent portfolio helps them to embed Jajah's telephony functions at the chip level of mobile phones. All these developments explain how VoIP companies drool over more speed on mobile phones. Their applications start pretty slow on often feeble and battery sucking cell phones. It takes a minute until you are connected to Wifi and have established a call with one of their softwares.

I guess: Either the four companies are developing secretly something together, to make their mobile VoIP applications start faster from a SIM card. Or United Mobile is developing an application to blow them all away. In this case they have just used the brand names of Truphone, Jajah and Skype for press release name dropping.

At least I'm sure that United Mobile's next press release can be even more interesting. What do you think?