Truphone ambition, one world, one SIM is happening!

Truphone’s ambition to provide one world, one SIM is happening. It’s launching a new service called truphone local anywhere. The new service requires a multi-country SIM card that eliminates roaming charges and provides local voice, data and text rates. This should be a boon to all those frequent international travelers. The good thing about the new service is that it provides a local number of the country where you are travelling. However, not so good news is that they only support 2 countries (USA and UK). Truphone is promising to add more international countries this year. The service is possible because of the partnership agreement with Vodafone UK network. The agreement will give Truphone access to Vodafone UK's network to deliver voice and data services to its Truphone Local Anywhere™ customers. It’s a matter of time before they can forge partnership with other operators.

Truphone Local Anywhere offers customers four main benefits:
• Local calling rates in Truphone countries: With Truphone Local Anywhere, international travelers enjoy rates that are a fraction of standard roaming fees. For example, AT&T subscribers roaming in the U.K. pay between 99 cents and $1.29 per minute[i], depending on their calling plans, but from only 12 cents per minute with Truphone Local Rates
• Local contact numbers in Truphone countries: Local numbers mean people can call you on your mobile at local rates for them – at no cost to you.
• Low-cost international calling: Great rates to make international calls at home or abroad, offering savings of up to 90 percent over standard mobile operator charges.
• Low-cost roaming: Great rates when roaming in non-Truphone countries offering savings of up to 40 percent over standard mobile operator charges.

Other benefits of Truphone Local Anywhere include:
• The ability to manage Caller ID the world over, displaying a local number wherever you are
• Savings of up to 80 percent on roaming charges when visiting other countries
• An option, coming soon, to keep your existing phone number by moving it over to the Truphone network

Looks like this year is going to be great for truphone. We are seeing lot of consolidation in the VoIP space. Last year we saw bunch of companies being acquired including Jajah getting acquired by telefonica. Startups like truphone have very good chances to get acquired by bigger player. It seems to me that truphone is moving in the right direction. I had written earlier about truphone on how they want to become a global MVNO . To me truphone is definitely one of hot startup to watch for this year.