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Mobile heaven…

March 15th, 2008

Previous readers of this blog will remember some of the travails with wireless telecoms (here and here). I’m happy to say that a large part of my hassles seem to have resolved themselves. I’ve moved my eight year old mobile number back out of Yahoo and signed up with T-mobile with a Blackberry Curve. I looked cursorily at some options: the iPhone is a non-starter for me without copy/paste, Verizon too expensive and AT&T just too bad… it was a particular T-Mobile feature that finally clinched it (many many thanks to Phil Wolff and Bill Campbell of SkypeJournal for that beauty of a tip). With a $9.99 monthly fee, my BB Curve will route calls over a wifi connection without costing me any minutes. Even better, if I start a call at home and then get into my car, it’ll seamlessly switch me over to the cell network. Given that I’m at a wifi connection about 70% of the time, it essentially means unlimited calling. Amazing to finally see one of the big guys ‘getting it’. In practice, it works most of the time – some calls are a bit VOIPy if the wifi isn’t good. As a final bonus, if I’m overseas, it means I can make U.S bound calls without roaming charges, which is doubly cool.

Which brings me to the final speed bump – international roaming. And for this, all hail Pat Phelan from MaxRoam, who bounced over to the blogger dinner at Blogtalk and left me a SIM and some credit to play with…

MaxRoam is a VMNO where you buy a SIM and phone numbers for countries you are traveling to, and if anyone calls any of those numbers, your handset rings wherever you are and you pay just local cell phone charges of about 25-35 cents. If you bounce around multiple countries, this is definitely for you…

I think Pat is onto something very huge here. The roaming marketplace must be in the billions and nobody is attacking it in such an interesting way.

The holy grail would be if I could use my Curve for laptop connectivity. That’s a lot to ask, but hey, it’s worked so far… : )

Entry Filed under: Blogging, Internet & Technology