Rip Of Roaming

OK so I will admit that I am currently somewhat addicted to my windows mobile phone.

 

But with my current gig in Brussels, especially as it is fixed price, I have been looking at mobile roaming for voice and data.

 

An excellent resource is http://www.roamingsims.com/ for voice calls. The general principal being that if you have an unlocked phone you can use one of these services to receive your calls for free.

Of course as a business person with all of the business cards (hopefully) floating around the world, changing your phone number twice a week is impossible. The simple thing being before you swap your SIM's just divert your "home" mobile number to the roaming SIM. This works well. Of course this means your mobile operator is not making a fat profit for allowing you to use your phone abroad, which despite the EU's intervention on roaming tariffs they still do. Also it does mean you will burn minutes as you will pay for the call to be forwarded. But as you should be making less to no outgoing calls this should be ok as long as you manage it.

Now do test this out but some of the tricks used by the mobile operators are:

Forwarding your number to another mobile is mysteriously (on page 9872) not covered in your inclusive minutes

Forwarding suddenly takes a long time with a "we are now forwarding your call" message appearing from nowhere.

Your forwarding suddenly gets "reset" to Default

 

Now of course none of our mobile operators would undertake such anti-competitive and illegal actions by design [ :) ] So to check up on these "accidents" I just call my home cell from the office first thing in the morning. If one of these overnight "accidents" has happened, you just put in your home SIM, cancel any diverts and then enable the diverts again. All if fixed until the next "random accident"

 

One of the other things with using one of these SIM's is as the generally have no data connection, you do not have applications phoning home and running up obscene data roaming charges. (don't get me started ) All I generally do is plug my phone into my laptop and it piggy backs off the back of the laptop and syncs everything it needs. All of my replies etc get synced when I get to the next location. This may all sound a bit difficult (and yes I am a bit of a closet techie) but my last client happily (?) paid my data roaming charges as I wandered around Europe for them. with a GBP 1k data roaming charge not being unusual, a little but of difficult is worth it on a fixed price job. Besides what else do you have to do in the evenings???

 

I may rant some on our friends the banks next time. It irritates me that I get paid in Euros, have expenses in Euros, but have to pass everything through UK banks and get ripped off with fees in both directions. Now when I worked in the US getting local Business and personal accounts (with required web access) was no problem (OK other than ID they understood), and moving cash was super easy with my friends at sterling exchange (http://www.sterlingexchange.co.uk/). But doing the same in the Euro zone at any reasonable cost is impossible.

All sensible suggestions gratefully accepted

 

 

Tell me what day it is and I will tell you where I am