October 11, 2011 at 12:42Calls abroad: travel SIM cards instead of local SIM cards
The vacation season is over, the townspeople are returning to their usual business, and mobile operators are calculating their summer profits. There were many topics on Habr on the topic of huge bills for calls while roaming abroad, expensive GPRS traffic, etc. Roaming looks attractive only in brochures: A
picture for “ roaming abroad ” A
well-known alternative to roaming has always been to buy a local SIM, but this method also has a number of inconveniences. The third option is the purchase of specialized travel SIM cards in Russia.
This topic is relatively young, so clarification will not be amiss. Many, like I once, notice the so-called tourist SIM-cards on the shelves of mobile communication salons, but take them for some other Big Three project. In fact, these are independent operators specializing exclusively in the provision of cellular services abroad, the largest of which - the companies Simtravel , Goodline and Teletie - are familiar to many who have recently traveled to rest abroad. The tourist sims have a number of features that make them a good alternative to buying a local SIM card and even more so when roaming from domestic operators.
The first telecommunications companies that were exclusively involved in roaming communications appeared in Russia in 2006. These were Travel Telecom and Extellsim. They issued SIM cards for specific countries (Turkey, Egypt, the UAE), sold poorly in retail and were replenished only with payment cards. Both companies closed, and with the liberation of the niche, their own “big three” of tourist operators formed: the Russian companies Simtravel and Goodline entered the market, operating on the same platform of the Estonian virtual operator and differing only in positioning, and started their work a little later. The international brand is from Latvia, Teletie, whose SIM cards are used by tourists from other countries of the world with a single Latvian number (+371 *******) of the GSM standard.
The main feature of tourist SIM-cards is the ability to save a Russian number, which allows you to stay in touch, avoiding the tedious procedure of notifying loved ones about a new number. This works quite simply: first, call forwarding to the service number is set. Then, with the help of a certain command, the Russian number is tied to a tourist SIM-card (this information falls into a kind of base). Thus, when a subscriber is called to a Russian number, the call is redirected first to the service number. At the same time, the call is identified and it is automatically transferred by the system to the tourist SIM card of the subscriber. Link- A description of the forwarding mechanism of Teletie. Such an incoming call for a subscriber of a tourist operator becomes paid, prices can be found on the websites of companies.
At the same time, it remains possible to receive all calls to your international number - in this case, incoming tourist SIM cards for the subscriber become free - but the subscriber who makes the call will pay for this connection.
Of course, they do not set up cell towers all over the world in order to provide subscribers with cheap communications. Travel SIM-cards are prepaid packages of a foreign operator. It is clear that wholesale purchase gives a serious price advantage. By analogy, corporate unlimited tariffs come to mind, which are very popular in Moscow: mobile operators provide companies with such conditions that ordinary subscribers have never dreamed of. Simtravel and Goodline buy pre-paid bulk packages of mobile phones operating in 190 countries from Estonians, Latvian Teletie numbers operate in 150 countries.
Prices for all "tourist" operators are approximately the same, a lot depends on the direction - the country where the client is going to go. Each has its own buns: for example, all companies offer the preservation of the Russian number, but for Simtravel it costs 0.2 cu per minute, Teletie is a little more expensive - 0.49 cu in a minute. But Teletai has the cheapest internet (from 24 kopecks for 10 Kb GPRS in Cyprus, in Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and some other countries ).
Low prices are provided by at least two facts:
Some are inclined to attribute the callback to the minuses of tourist communication, believing that not everyone can get used to it. It is for them that there are mobile applications with which the call is made in the usual way, without Call Back. For example, an Android application from Simtravel (in addition, on my site I also found applications for Windows Mobile and Symbian):
Comfort Callback application from Simtravel
An obvious alternative to travel sim cards is to buy local SIM cards in the host country. Vodafone is considered particularly beneficial. But all local sims, compared to tourist ones, have one big minus: a rather expensive call forwarding from a Russian number, so in each country the subscriber will have to inform his family of the new number and doom them to international calls. In addition, if the subscriber has opted for a local SIM, then with a zero balance, the connection will not be available to him. And with a tourist’s trip, even staying aground, everything will also be able to receive incoming calls completely free of charge for himself in most countries.
Another obvious minus of local operators is the limitation of the validity of the SIM card. If you do not constantly replenish the balance (and, most likely, once you buy a local SIM card on occasion, the subscriber may not return to the same country in the coming years), the number is canceled and the SIM card can be safely thrown into the trash. As for the local pre-paid communication packages for tourists, they are valid for only a month.
Another competitive environment for travel SIM-cards is Russian mobile operators. However, their standard roaming is ten times more expensive. Of course, many of them issued offers for vacationers by the summer. Yes, and those are less profitable than travel SIM-cards, because, for example, reducing the fee for incoming calls, operators leave the cost of outgoing calls equal to 70 rubles (like Beeline), or do not reduce the tariff for GPRS. After all, Russian operators are oligopolists who can afford to lay a large margin in prices due to the actual lack of competition.
One example of the activity of domestic cell phones in this field: on July 27, MTS blocked call forwarding to service numbers 8-800 *******, motivating it with a large-scale fraud (fraud). Allegedly, content providers or IP-telephony operators made these numbers paid, and, giving out as free (because they are similar in format to the numbers), bred subscribers for money. However, instead of fighting against unscrupulous partners (which the same MTS successfully conducts at the front of short numbers), they chose to close the forwarding to all numbers of the above format.
The piquancy of this situation lies in the fact that one of the operators of international SIM-cards format number 8-800 was used to provide the service "preservation of the Russian number." Accordingly, when MTS closed the call forwarding, the possibility of free call forwarding from Russia abroad was not available to their subscribers. Which, of course, was sad for everyone except the "eggheads", who, in fact, thus decided to regain some of the roaming profits eaten away by tourist sims. Teletie has now solved the problem by replacing the service number with a direct one. This made the service a bit more expensive (exactly the cost of forwarding the MTS number to a direct Moscow city number). MTS is not the first time to get into ugly stories , but now is not about that.
While dissatisfied subscribers throw complaints to mobile operators, the market for tourist SIM cards is growing and this growth cannot be stopped. According to unofficial statistics provided to me by one friend, by occupation related to the cellular market, no more than 5% of subscribers now opt for travel SIM-cards when they go on vacation. And this means that the potential is huge. The Big Three is unlikely to willingly part with its super-profits, so it will be interesting to follow the development of events. Of course, it is possible that some of them will sooner or later make their own tourist SIM-card, but for this brutal pricing will have to give up. In any case, consumers will not be a loser: travel SIM cards can be bought in any mobile phone store or even in a hypermarket, stocking up on products for the weekend.
picture for “ roaming abroad ” A
well-known alternative to roaming has always been to buy a local SIM, but this method also has a number of inconveniences. The third option is the purchase of specialized travel SIM cards in Russia.
This topic is relatively young, so clarification will not be amiss. Many, like I once, notice the so-called tourist SIM-cards on the shelves of mobile communication salons, but take them for some other Big Three project. In fact, these are independent operators specializing exclusively in the provision of cellular services abroad, the largest of which - the companies Simtravel , Goodline and Teletie - are familiar to many who have recently traveled to rest abroad. The tourist sims have a number of features that make them a good alternative to buying a local SIM card and even more so when roaming from domestic operators.
Background
The first telecommunications companies that were exclusively involved in roaming communications appeared in Russia in 2006. These were Travel Telecom and Extellsim. They issued SIM cards for specific countries (Turkey, Egypt, the UAE), sold poorly in retail and were replenished only with payment cards. Both companies closed, and with the liberation of the niche, their own “big three” of tourist operators formed: the Russian companies Simtravel and Goodline entered the market, operating on the same platform of the Estonian virtual operator and differing only in positioning, and started their work a little later. The international brand is from Latvia, Teletie, whose SIM cards are used by tourists from other countries of the world with a single Latvian number (+371 *******) of the GSM standard.
Saving a Russian number
The main feature of tourist SIM-cards is the ability to save a Russian number, which allows you to stay in touch, avoiding the tedious procedure of notifying loved ones about a new number. This works quite simply: first, call forwarding to the service number is set. Then, with the help of a certain command, the Russian number is tied to a tourist SIM-card (this information falls into a kind of base). Thus, when a subscriber is called to a Russian number, the call is redirected first to the service number. At the same time, the call is identified and it is automatically transferred by the system to the tourist SIM card of the subscriber. Link- A description of the forwarding mechanism of Teletie. Such an incoming call for a subscriber of a tourist operator becomes paid, prices can be found on the websites of companies.
At the same time, it remains possible to receive all calls to your international number - in this case, incoming tourist SIM cards for the subscriber become free - but the subscriber who makes the call will pay for this connection.
How it works
Of course, they do not set up cell towers all over the world in order to provide subscribers with cheap communications. Travel SIM-cards are prepaid packages of a foreign operator. It is clear that wholesale purchase gives a serious price advantage. By analogy, corporate unlimited tariffs come to mind, which are very popular in Moscow: mobile operators provide companies with such conditions that ordinary subscribers have never dreamed of. Simtravel and Goodline buy pre-paid bulk packages of mobile phones operating in 190 countries from Estonians, Latvian Teletie numbers operate in 150 countries.
Prices for all "tourist" operators are approximately the same, a lot depends on the direction - the country where the client is going to go. Each has its own buns: for example, all companies offer the preservation of the Russian number, but for Simtravel it costs 0.2 cu per minute, Teletie is a little more expensive - 0.49 cu in a minute. But Teletai has the cheapest internet (from 24 kopecks for 10 Kb GPRS in Cyprus, in Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and some other countries ).
Low prices are provided by at least two facts:
- The Baltic countries are members of the European Union, therefore, the rates for foreign calls there are much lower;
- Operators of tourist SIM-cards use Call Back technology, which transfers an outgoing call to an incoming one (if a subscriber calls, for example, to Russia from Europe, the server drops the outgoing call, then a callback follows, and the phone receives an incoming call). Due to the fact that the connection is made through the operator’s servers located in the Baltic States, where communication tariffs are by definition lower, the cost of the call is significantly reduced.
Some are inclined to attribute the callback to the minuses of tourist communication, believing that not everyone can get used to it. It is for them that there are mobile applications with which the call is made in the usual way, without Call Back. For example, an Android application from Simtravel (in addition, on my site I also found applications for Windows Mobile and Symbian):
Comfort Callback application from Simtravel
Alternatives
An obvious alternative to travel sim cards is to buy local SIM cards in the host country. Vodafone is considered particularly beneficial. But all local sims, compared to tourist ones, have one big minus: a rather expensive call forwarding from a Russian number, so in each country the subscriber will have to inform his family of the new number and doom them to international calls. In addition, if the subscriber has opted for a local SIM, then with a zero balance, the connection will not be available to him. And with a tourist’s trip, even staying aground, everything will also be able to receive incoming calls completely free of charge for himself in most countries.
Another obvious minus of local operators is the limitation of the validity of the SIM card. If you do not constantly replenish the balance (and, most likely, once you buy a local SIM card on occasion, the subscriber may not return to the same country in the coming years), the number is canceled and the SIM card can be safely thrown into the trash. As for the local pre-paid communication packages for tourists, they are valid for only a month.
Our
Another competitive environment for travel SIM-cards is Russian mobile operators. However, their standard roaming is ten times more expensive. Of course, many of them issued offers for vacationers by the summer. Yes, and those are less profitable than travel SIM-cards, because, for example, reducing the fee for incoming calls, operators leave the cost of outgoing calls equal to 70 rubles (like Beeline), or do not reduce the tariff for GPRS. After all, Russian operators are oligopolists who can afford to lay a large margin in prices due to the actual lack of competition.
One example of the activity of domestic cell phones in this field: on July 27, MTS blocked call forwarding to service numbers 8-800 *******, motivating it with a large-scale fraud (fraud). Allegedly, content providers or IP-telephony operators made these numbers paid, and, giving out as free (because they are similar in format to the numbers), bred subscribers for money. However, instead of fighting against unscrupulous partners (which the same MTS successfully conducts at the front of short numbers), they chose to close the forwarding to all numbers of the above format.
The piquancy of this situation lies in the fact that one of the operators of international SIM-cards format number 8-800 was used to provide the service "preservation of the Russian number." Accordingly, when MTS closed the call forwarding, the possibility of free call forwarding from Russia abroad was not available to their subscribers. Which, of course, was sad for everyone except the "eggheads", who, in fact, thus decided to regain some of the roaming profits eaten away by tourist sims. Teletie has now solved the problem by replacing the service number with a direct one. This made the service a bit more expensive (exactly the cost of forwarding the MTS number to a direct Moscow city number). MTS is not the first time to get into ugly stories , but now is not about that.
While dissatisfied subscribers throw complaints to mobile operators, the market for tourist SIM cards is growing and this growth cannot be stopped. According to unofficial statistics provided to me by one friend, by occupation related to the cellular market, no more than 5% of subscribers now opt for travel SIM-cards when they go on vacation. And this means that the potential is huge. The Big Three is unlikely to willingly part with its super-profits, so it will be interesting to follow the development of events. Of course, it is possible that some of them will sooner or later make their own tourist SIM-card, but for this brutal pricing will have to give up. In any case, consumers will not be a loser: travel SIM cards can be bought in any mobile phone store or even in a hypermarket, stocking up on products for the weekend.
