A Cellphone Without Borders

Cubic Telecom, a small Irish telecommunications firm, is releasing what it calls "the first global mobile phone", which uses the cellular network for connecting to the internet for global calling. According to this New York Times report, currently, global mobile calling is possible through certain cellphone companies, for example, T-Mobile and AT&T, which rely on the same type of network called Global System for Mobile (GSM) that most of the rest of the mobile cellular world uses. Roaming fees are charged for global calling through the GSM system. As stated here, these costs are higher than the new technology from Cubic Telecom on which calls to or from any of 160 countries can be made, in many cases, at local call rates. The Cubic system works like a prepaid phone where the user puts money into their account and uses it per call made, with no traditional monthly fee.


The phone's function includes the following details:

1. At the MaxRoam.com site from Cubic, the user can request local phone numbers in up to 50 cities at no charge, enabling a single user to have a Paris number and a Mexico City number, for example, that callers overseas can dial to call the user's cellphone. This means that those callers in the designated city locations can call for the price of a local call.
2. Voice quality is typical of internet calls: understandable, but slightly muffled, with a quarter-second to one-second voice delay.
3. For a flat US$42 a month (September 2007 rates), a user can turn on an unlimited Wi-Fi calling option. It allows receiving unlimited unmetered calls to any numbers in the world from internet hot spots, or making calls for a penny a minute. Functioning at hot spots that require a password, but not ones that require a web-page login, the Cubic phone drops the call when you leave the hot spot, unlike services that move seamlessly from internet to cellular call function.
4. Because calls are carried over the internet, dialing requires a country code and area code for every call.
5. The phone will hang up and ring back for each call because placing a call sets off Cubic’s own system to both make the call and make a call back connection to the user phone, "avoiding the big carriers’ expensive cellular networks."
6. Everyday domestic calling rates haven’t been determined yet, but may be more than domestic cellular or landline calls.
7. Because Cubic’s global dialing has nothing to do with the cellphone they sell, through the purchase of a [Subscriber Identity Module] SIM card, the memory card that determines user account information, some cell phones can use the Cubic system, except for the Wi-Fi hot spot calling function, which is a web-access technology specific to the Cubic cellphone.