SIP2SIM card

Andrews and Arnold pulling the plug on the original SIP2SIM was a bit of a wrench, as nothing else out there could touch it for features, at least not for the sort of cheap-as-chips pricing it sported.

In particular, the genuine de-coupling of SIMs and numbers - so you could trivally hop on a web page and temporarily redirect numbers while people were on leave - was a game changer. Tell me whether the £40/month and up “business mobile” offerings from the big players come close? Thought not.

But, the replacement wasn’t quite ready in time and I had to re-home half a dozen subscribers across various charities and churches I’d set up telephony for over the years.

Still, the new offering is now up and running. I’d like to try the eSIM option, but for the use-case that came up, we settled for a good old fashioned physical SIM card. AA’s facility to print on the SIMs appears to be out of use, but it was always a bit of a gimmick which ended up in the bin five minutes after arriving, so let’s skip over that.

The control panel has been improved in a few places so it’s less manual and faffy to link one of these SIMs to an AA VOIP number. Though the data enablement is clunky as anything, much to the frustration of the support team having to answer the same question repeatedly about why a button doesn’t appear to do anything.

On the subject of data, it’s both a good thing and a bad thing that the pricing model has been overhauled. The scrapping of the “airtime” charges for inbound calls and SMS is much easier to reason about - although on average, it never actually mattered under the old model.

£42 per month all-in for a decent data allowance is perfectly fine in comparison to “business” mobile phone tariffs, although it does rule it out for a light home user (or make it way cheaper to get your data via a second SIM - which is at least sensible given that eSIM is available).

So far so good, and I’ll update you if anything doesn’t Just Work as expected with the new venture.