A Los Angeles Times reporter recently called me for advice about a $400 AT&T bill covering his iPhone activities while “roaming” in Vancouver, Canada, over a weekend. He wanted to know what could be done to reduce such charges while travelling outside his carrier’s home territory. He’s in luck: Truphone says today its planning to launch one solution later this year: Truphone Local Anywhere. It’s a single SIM service that provides local numbers across multiple carriers (internationally!) on a single handset. Bottom line: Road warriors and mobile professionals can avoid roaming-charge shock on international travel. It’s due to launch in the third quarter.
This is really good news. Does it work for iPhone that are locked to AT&T?
Basically it is supposed to work on any GSM phone in which is placed a multi-carrier SIM chip.
There are a couple of services like this in the market already. Check out Maxroam. http://maxroam.com
Sounds very interesting. A bit like MyCosmik (www.mycosmik.com) that is in beta.
How does the one SIM solution work? Does that mean that I have to choose a carrier that is a partner of Truephone?
No, it won’t work on the iPhone as it’s a SIM, so will only work in a SIM unlocked phone (you can always jailbreak and SIM unlock using Yellowsn0w).
It’s similar to MaxRoam and AwayPhone who have SIMs available now.
I am digging it already! I can now ditch my sack of SIM cards that I carry around… I am already using two of their products Sim4Travel and Truphone whilst I am attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona…