TORONTO – Coming off a successful crowdfunding campaign, Toronto start-up KnowRoaming will soon go live with its SIM smart sticker solution for dramatically reducing wireless roaming charges for customers travelling abroad.
By applying the KnowRoaming sticker to an existing SIM card on an unlocked phone, wireless customers travelling abroad can connect seamlessly to local service providers in 220 countries where KnowRoaming currently has wireless roaming rate agreements. As a result, KnowRoaming says its customers will save up to 90% on voice, data and texting roaming charges when travelling outside Canada.
Key selling points of the sticker is it removes the need for customers to buy travel roaming packages from their Canadian carriers prior to a trip and it eliminates the need for people to purchase and install different SIM cards for each of the countries they may travel to in order to access local roaming rates.
“People could access these rates using a second SIM card and get these significant discounts. The real value-add that our company brings is the convenience and the delivery mechanism of the sticker to access these rates,” explained Gregory Gundelfinger, CEO and co-founder of KnowRoaming.
Gundelfinger said the sticker will work with all SIM cards, as long as the phone has been unlocked (i.e. contract-free) from the customer’s service provider. According to KnowRoaming’s web site, the sticker is easy to apply and comes with a special applicator for the customer to use. The sticker technology makes the customer’s SIM card a local SIM for whatever country they’re in by automatically detecting when customers’ phones have left their home country and begun roaming.
Using a free companion iOS and Android app to manage their KnowRoaming account, customers buy pre-paid credit that can be topped up and never expires. The app will be available for iOS, Android, Windows and Blackberry platforms.
“People could access these rates using a second SIM card and get these significant discounts. The real value-add that our company brings is the convenience and the delivery mechanism of the sticker to access these rates." – Gregory Gundelfinger.
Cheaper roaming solutions is something travellers are desperate for and that was reflected in how KnowRoaming quickly raised $104,170 in pre-sale orders during its 45-day crowdfunding project, which was three times what it was expecting in pre-sales. At $35 per sticker, that represents roughly 3,000 customers.
Gundelfinger said KnowRoaming actually achieved its original project goal of 1,000 stickers sold in the first 72 hours of the campaign. The first 500 stickers sold will be shipped to customers in the next two weeks, with the remaining stickers expected to ship in February. The company is planning a second pre-sale marketing drive for early 2014.
In an email interview, Amit Kaminer, telecom research analyst for the Seaboard Group in Toronto, said having roaming rate agreements in 220 countries is “huge” for KnowRoaming. “One of the most challenging things is to line up the wholesale network before you go for customers, and without customers, you are just another noise in the channel,” Kaminer wrote.
Kaminer added that speed to market will be important for KnowRoaming. “They can’t rest on their laurels and have to be quick in putting the sticker in customers’ hands (or phones),” he wrote. “Tier two type carriers are ramping up their roaming propositions: T-Mobile and Three for example offer free roaming to/in various parts of the globe. We suspect others would follow.”
Another feature of the KnowRoaming sticker is it will allow customers to use call forwarding to receive incoming calls to their home mobile phone number while abroad. Customers will need to first purchase a local number in the country they are travelling to, using the KnowRoaming app, to receive forwarded calls. Currently, customers can purchase a local/forwarding number in about 50 of the countries with which KnowRoaming has roaming rate agreements. Gundelfinger said KnowRoaming will be adding more countries to that list as time goes on.
The KnowRoaming sticker solution addresses the problem of “bill shock” that travellers experience when they arrive back home and see what they incurred in roaming charges while abroad, adds its CEO.
“Apart from the cost savings, our product really does address that because we’ve got this app that gives you real-time billing for all your data, calls and texts,” Gundelfinger said. “The user always knows where they stand and there’s no risk of any overages because it’s all prepaid.”
