Retain your own mobile number

Another innovation in the pipeline is to enable travelers to retain their own mobile number while roaming overseas. Supposing you are in Hong Kong and you wish to call you colleague who in roaming in Canada. You simply dial his Hong Kong mobile number, which automatically forwards calls to your colleague in Canada at very low cost.

Says Raymond Ngan, Telewise International’s chief operations officer: “Telewise International’s King of SIM roaming service will be especially valuable for roaming in the European market, where visitors frequently cross the borders of up to 14 nations. Telewise International will also focus on markets such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Africa, where mobile phones are popular, but roaming can be costly”.

The King of SIM card will cost about $550, including $70 of tariff value, which can be increased with a ‘top-up card’ or over the Internet. The roaming number assigned can be retained by the users if the card is renewed within six months.

Cut-price roaming is just one result of the worldwide liberalization of the telecommunications industry, which started in the US in the 1980s. Before that, most government used national security as an excuse to create monopolies that tended to be over-staffed and complacent. It took weeks to get a phone line and technical innovation was example, Hong Kong’s OFTA (Telecommunications Authority) estimates that the average charge for overseas calls was over $7 a minute as late as 1995, whereas today, shrewd subscribers can call some popular overseas destinations for $0.25 or less.

Monopoly pricing was first breached by a clever invention known as callback and Telewise International was one of the companies formed to utilize it: “We thought customers should have the right to enjoy benefits brought to them by new telecommunications technology offered by independent MVNOs. Through their service, customers won’t be exploited by high roaming service fees. We believed competition would benefit both customers and the industry.” says Lao.

Tallback vendors buy or lease international carrier lines at low commercial rates and then resell them as very cheap IDD services. The customers first call the callback service number through their regular phone companies, then hang up without waiting for any response. The callback network detects the subscribers’ numbers and calls them back on its own low-cost line.

Companies such Telewise International helped create a competitive telephony market: “This low-cost competition drove the former monopoly companies crazy, but they could not stop it, economic levels.” says Lao.

Lao’s company claims a technical edge in callback services, for while most competitors offer their users only a single local access number which may often be engaged, Telewise International provides a unique number to each user, so the service is always available. Another advantage is that the company’s Travelers Calling Card can be used in 120 countries, using the same network with a different access number. Globally, Televise offers about 50 callback cards, including those that access its own virtual network and those which it distributes.

The Hong Kong telephony market is very competitive, but that does not neon that everyone gets cheap calls. Residential phone users who dial a three-digit prefix number to obtain a 'promotional' rate will still commonly pay $10- 20 a minute to phone most countries.