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

The above is exactly why I don't play the SIM-swap game. When I travel internationally, I just roam. I will use Skype from my smartphone for outbound voice calls, which are almost free if I'm in WiFi range, and a fraction of the cost of a roaming voice call if I need to use it over data roaming. And, I'll often be in a hotel with included Internet, so my data needs are not great. I might spend an average of $15/day on int'l data and voice roaming. It's just not worth enough to work through all of the above issues each time I change a country, and have less connectivity as a result. It's really simple: I just turn on my phone when the plane lands and it works. There's nothing to figure out or buy.

We took a very, very, hard line on this as $2500 roaming bills were common place and some individuals had a pretty dismissive attitude about it. I found a few of these individuals antagonizing because I knew they were already traveling with a personal phone setup with a local SIM.

Ultimately we just didn't give them a choice in the matter, telecom costs (not just cellular and roaming) were out of control and we got direction from the very top to reign them in. But made it as simple as possible. The phone would be pre-programmed with all their contacts prepended for seamless international dialing and we would setup a local VOIP DID that would call forward to the international number and if they wished they could forward their cell phone to that local number as well.

As a bit of a carrot we made all the loaner devices new iPhones. Practically speaking the only real problem we encountered was some carriers brutally throttled prepaid data and not roaming data.

We probably could have setup a side-business selling SIM cards because they began turning up with their kids, friends and spouses looking for the same setup for their personal use.

I do carry second phone for foreign sim. It is perfect for visiting country folks to contact you or make local calls. Having said that I still need to keep my home country mobile on roaming with data day pass enabled.

It works to keep the phone bill reasonable (under 500usd) but there are occasional ones over 500usd if I am on extended business trip.

I am experiencing a tactic now - forward my mobile to local flynumber. From flynumber I can forward to foreign number with very low rates.

Also flynumber comes with VoIP feature free. Next I will try to setup my home mobile with that to enjoy cheap rates

Hopefully I can avoid those used 2500 mobile bills.

I don't understand this piece at all. Can you explain please?

Are you suggesting this as an option only for people that want a "seamless" experience? For the more casual or cost-sensitive traveler, would you suggest this vs. a local SIM?

Roaming SIMs such as eKit, Piranha, etc, use a callback dialer in many countries to keep prices low. You dial a number, it rings you back, and completes the call. It is far more seamless than third party callback services, but there are more connection failures than on direct dial schemes.

I would suggest it is just a cost of doing business, but it is maybe a case of how senior your execs are. Do you really want them messing round with prefixes, etc.

If you want to reduce costs just tell them how much they're spending and that it will have a direct impact on next year's pay/bonus, etc.

And if they're really spending $2,500 a month then I'd be talking to the phone company - if you're putting that amount of business through them I'm sure they'd be happy to discuss their pricing (or even, if you're that way inclined, to place a cap on their roaming data allowance). Just tell them you're moving to using roaming sims and see what their response is.

Another solution is to disable roaming altogether and tell everyone that if they are travelling overseas they must get a sim from you before they travel. It would probably be better value to get a bunch of contracts set up in each country which can be freely shared. $50 a month is still going to be way cheaper tham using roaming.

I really haven't encountered many people at the executive level who lack the ability to make an international phone call.

can anyone say how Piranha compares with onesimcard (other then price of course) as far as call quality, etc...?

Make the "dismissive" employees turn the roaming bills in monthly on an expense report.

When their bosses see the high bills, behaviors will change.