This is a post I put on another forum. I was wondering what people's thoughts were. An Australian IT guy was trying to figure out how to get his execs to use roaming SIMs rather than Telstra's international roaming:

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I have been playing with roaming SIMs for a number of years. Now, I travel mostly recreationally, but my wife travels for work and has spent a great deal of time in many countries around the world. I’ve also given my sister and best friend a Piranha Mobile SIM card. My sister is director of international talent for a global company; my wife is a computer consultant for a Fortune 500 and works globally, and my best friend is a Vice President of one of German’s largest corporations. Collectively, they are internationally travelling forty plus weeks a year. I support them all plus my brother (and family) in Australia.

A global SIM card can save a ton of money, but it is not seamless. People need to understand how it works and how to manually dial a callback call if the call does not complete automatically. What an executive needs to understand is that the price difference you are saving using the SIM card is massive, not just a few dollars. You really need to share with them the raw numbers. It effectively pays for their first class upgrade on their plane ride (if your company allows such upgrades).

If they are putting the roaming SIM card into their smartphone, I think you should offer to loan them a dumb phone, (a plain Nokia the full complement of 3g frequencies) with either their SIM card or a backup mainstream SIM in case something goes wrong.

Callbacks double the chance of a call not going through. Most cellular networks are optimized in a way that if the network is overloaded, outbound calls go out and incoming calls go to voicemail. Customers notice when an outbound call fails, but often rationalize away why an inbound call is missed (if it doesn’t happen all the time). When you trigger a callback call, you’ve got a potential problem with the USSD or SMS getting delayed and in you are more susceptible to network congestion. Sometimes, you will need to manually trigger the callback with the USSD command, “***111***6175551212#.” Program that into the phone directory at least so that they can call your office.

The person making the call has power over you and may already be frustrated from a bad night’s sleep on the plain, jet lag, bad negotiations, feeling dirty from the plane ride, or feeling a little disoriented and vulnerable because they are out of their comfort zone. You are the natural target of some of their wrath when the call fails. As far as they are concerned the old system isn’t broken and your fix is unneeded. You need to make them a partner in the financial savings and you need to make sure they have a lifeline. Again, they need to know that the average exec probably racks up a $1500 + roaming bill per trip.

I would develop for them trip tickets for their countries and a way to make sure that everything works as seamlessly as possible. You are also going to have a hard time telling someone who flies 250,000 miles a year that he is going to need to attend a training seminar on how to use his phone, so you are best developing other ways to get the message through.

You need to be able to see the world through this group’s eyes to strike the best balance. Unless your CEO is willing to send you on a global “fact finding mission,” I would try to friend someone in this camp and have a lunch or two to try to get a better understanding of things on their side. They don’t regard the jetsetting as glamorous or a company funded holiday, they regard it as tiring, taxing, and sometimes frustrating.

I’ve heard that, Piranha is about to implement direct dial from most of Europe. Piranha offers Australian DIDs and ships with a UK and US mobile number. The UK one is a true UK number (e.g. not Isle of Mann or Jersey). The jetsetters might like having these local numbers and this might be helpful. Truphone is more expensive, but may be a good fit for you as well.

For extensive international travellers, I might look at a good quality dual SIM phone. The problem is that I haven’t been able to find a quadband HSPA model and you really want quadband HSPA in both slots. Most are either 850/1900/2100mhz or 900/1900/2100mhz. Since I don’t know who your base carrier is, this could be an issue. Further, the dualSIM phones are still have a generation behind and often have only one SIM slot with a full HSPA radio (all frequencies).

Most of the roaming SIMs use TMobile’s network in the US rather than ATT’s. (Piranha lets use ATT optionally but is more expensive on voice calls. It is cheaper on data). TMobile is refarming its network to 1900mhz, but a lot is still on the 1700mhz band. You really are best with a Pentaband HSPA phone like a Galaxy Nexus 4 to pull this off.

In the old days, it was easy to loan out a phone for foreign travel. Smartphones, however, are so personal that this is tough. You might as well be loaning out used (but laundered) undergarments. People will simply not be comfortable with that.

I’m not completely sure of the solutions for this. One solution I can think of is finding a smallish smartphone with hotspot capacity and sending out with them as well. Temporarily set it to pull their email, backup the phone, and work to optimize it for data efficiency with Onavo. Put Whatsapp, Viber, and all that on the phone together with a ton of Apps that are geared towards the US and Europe. Include folders named for the major travel cities that they visit and include things like cab hailing programs, parking meter apps, restaurant review apps that are best for that country, on device GPS for those countries…).

Lastly, remember that when the person’s Australian SIM is in their wallet, they are not getting text messages from back home. Hong Kong carriers let you forward text messages to foreign SIMs, but I haven’t found a great way to do it with anyone else. (There are some SMS forwarding programs for Android, but the phone needs to be on for them to work).

Good luck. I’d love to hear your experiences