Roam Mobility, Vancouver, BC

Like many working professionals, I travel all over the world for business. And when I travel, I need to stay in touch with business contacts, friends and family. But I found that even though my life, and the lives of everyone I know, is becoming more mobile and more global every day, my mobile phone service was not keeping pace. Staying in touch by mobile phone while traveling was always a stressful — and expensive — experience. With high roaming charges of ... per minute and more, I was often astonished to discover that my monthly phone bill ran to several hundred dollars! It was especially frustrating because as a technology professional, I knew there wasn’t a good reason for such high roaming rates. In an effort to keep my roaming costs from soaring, I began experimenting with using local mobile network providers and combining country-specific SIM cards with unlocked phones. These techniques helped reduce the high cost of roaming charges, but they were complicated to set up and involved managing multiple cell phones, keeping track of multiple phone numbers, and ensuring the SIM cards didn’t expire and leave me stranded. I knew there had to be a simpler, more affordable way to avoid the high cost of roaming — something that would allow me to sidestep the major network providers and avoid their unnecessarily high roaming rates. And during a business trip to Europe, I finally discovered it. It’s a simple solution that has been used by people on the continent for some time, but that was virtually unknown in North America. By combining a single SIM card (a microchip “ID” card that identifies the phone and connects it to the network) with a quad band GSM phone (a global standard cell phone capable of working on all four cell phone frequencies), and sourcing the right network partners, my company was able to deliver very low roaming costs on GSM networks in over 200 countries around the world.