I've always admired Pat Phelan, right, from afar. Quite literally, because he's in Cork, Ireland and I'm up in the Seattle area of Washington state in the US.

Yesterday, the next phase in Pat Phelan's plan to stick it to the man-the telecom man-has been unveiled. He is now partnering his company Cubic Telecom with the folks at Global Roaming, which offer a very similar product to the one Pat Phelan's company offers. Both products are designed to make it cheaper and easier to make and receive calls on your mobile phone while you are abroad. VoIP is used to enable this cheap calling, thus why it is of note here on the VoIP Weblog.

What wasn't announced in the press release, but slipped out on Pat's Jaiku stream was that the MAXroam service would soon be much cheaper in the US/Canada. Right now, it's prohibitively expensive, but Pat is saying by early 2008 the price should be about 12 cents (presuming Eurocents here). I'm not going to hold Pat to those rates, but if it's true, it does sound a fair bit better than the 1.18 Euros it now costs to receive and make calls within the USA. Heck at that price, it might even replace prepaid service with AT&T or T-Mobile!