Low Cost Global Roaming

Business people who travel extensively, or work closely with international clients and suppliers, are continually seeking the ‘Holy Grail’ of communications - international roaming that doesn’t break the bank. We frequently hear people ask questions like "Why can’t I make and receive phone calls and do my email when abroad without it costing the earth?", or "How can I make it easy for my overseas business contacts to reach me?". We wanted to answer those questions, and we have with Obsidian Low Cost Global Roaming.

Key benefits

How does it work?
This new mobile service gives you local rates and numbers wherever you need them with just one global SIM that acts like a local SIM internationally. You simply select which ‘local’ countries you’d like to include and then just pay local rates to make and receive calls, or use data, in these countries – in fact in Europe and Asia it’s even free to receive calls!

You can have multiple local numbers on one SIM, but the service cleverly displays the number that’s local to the person being called. The service also offers competitive global roaming rates in all other countries, and everything is charged via a single consolidated bill, to keep things simple.

Where does it work?
This brand new service commenced in the US and the UK and was launched in January 2010. This will be followed by Australia, the Netherlands and Hong Kong later on in Q1 2010. The ongoing rollout after this date is due to encompass many key countries including Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Ireland in the EU as well as Singapore, Japan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, UEA and Russia across the rest of the world. All of these will become what is known as ‘local’ countries, where the Obsidian Low Cost Global Roaming service will operate.

What are the benefits?
With our global roaming SIM cards you only pay local rates, as there are no roaming charges in your ‘local’ countries. This enables you to save around 50% on the cost of international calls from mobiles, as well as offering competitive roaming charges throughout the rest of world.

Existing mobile numbers can be ported to the service and users are not disrupted in any way as there are no dial codes, SIM swaps, dial back systems or applications to load - users simply make calls as normal. Multiple local numbers can be added to the same SIM in all your ‘local’ countries.

Trial ‘Starter Pack’
Be one of the first to try this new Low Cost Global Roaming service. Our 30 day trial is available for five users and includes a loan handset for the period of the trial, if required.

Our partner
We deliver our Low Cost Global Roaming service in partnership with leading UK-based global mobile communications provider, Truphone whose scalable, carrier-class systems and carrier-grade interconnects support hundreds of thousands of business and consumer users worldwide.

Historically, because these forms of communication could not be recorded, many organisations have ’locked down’ their corporate mobile devices so that messaging services cannot be accessed by their users. However, as technology develops, users now expect to be able to take advantage of all available communication methods, which they are familiar with using in the office and in their personal lives, and their customers also expect the same.

Taking SMS as an example, this is now seen as a mainstream tool both in business and for personal communication, but according to Sarbanes Oxley, SMS messages are classed as a business record and therefore must be archived in the same way as other such documents. So if you want to enable your staff to communicate in this way, you must find a compliant method of recording and storing those messages.