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Roaming is defined by the GSM Association as the ability for a cellular customer to automatically make & receive voice calls when travelling outside the geographical coverage area of the home network, by means of using a visited network.
Because of the high proportion of the population who have used their mobile phone while on holiday or business abroad, the term has become widely understood, along with the implications:
- You pay to receive incoming calls on your mobile phone - this is often £0.80 - £0.90 or more per minute.
- You pay substantially more for your usual calls to home and the office - again, likely to be at least £0.80 - £0.90 per minute.
- Calls "in country" cost much more than calls "at home" - you guessed it, this can be £0.80 - £0.90 per minute again.
- Calls to part of the same group travelling abroad are doubly expensive, billed on the call-originating phone as an international call, and on the call-receiving phone as an inbound roaming phone call.
- Calls are particularly expensive if you roam with a standard "pay as you go" domestic service.
There are some marketing programmes of the UK networks to lessen the costs to some of their subscriber groups, but the fact remains that mobile phone roaming is expensive; it is often justified as being less expensive than alternatives such as using hotel phone systems.
 The 09 Mobile pay as you go SIM card costs €39 (+ VAT) to buy and comes with €15 of airtime, so is a real bargain.
It is free to receive calls in more than 100 countries, and calls in country and back home are less expensive than you usually pay. Check out the tariff calculator.
TIP: You can call your Icelandic 09 Mobile Global Roaming SIM card for only 20p a minute by registering free and getting a direct access dial number from us. Call the number allocated to you, and the phone you have put your prepaid roaming SIM card into rings. (And you can also get yourself a direct dial number that only costs 10p a minute to call a UK mobile!)
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