vRoam unveiled its plans late last year and is now planning to aggressively expand globally. The deal with AAPT, with mobile roaming effectively provided by Vodafone, allows it to offer its service to Australian-based customers who travel overseas regularly.

The vRoam Global service gets around the intricacies of the GMS mobile roaming system by using a back-end process called Virtual Roaming, and through the issuance of a separate SIM card. The process aims to reduce or eliminate the three charges that consumers get slugged with – the charge for receiving a call when overseas, the charge for a missed call and the fee that is billed when a message gets logged into the recipient’s inbox. It claims it can cut roaming charges by 50%, by avoiding the age-old GSM network practice of "tromboned calls’’.

In Australia, vRoam is in talks with distributors of corporate communications services such as e-mail roaming to act as its agents, while its also targeting corporate travel agents. It hopes to capture significant sales among corporate, while the offshore expansion is happening quickly. "We are hoping to launch in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US in the first quarter this year,’’ Nathanson said. The company launched in the UK in late December, signing up Telecom plus as its operator , which provides low-cost telephony services to the residential and SOHO markets.

Nathanson is a former Alcatel executive who left the company in May to join the creators of the virtual roaming technology, Ian Basckin and Leslie Frank. As an example of the cost advantages it aims to offer, the company is offering cheap rates for Australians travelling to the World Cup cricket finals in South Africa next month.

"We provide the user with a fully itemised bill for better control of call costs,’’ Nathanson said. "In addition, the user is still always contactable on their usual Australian mobile phone number and has the option of being contacted directly in South Africa to avoid paying for the incoming call.’’

The company said the average roaming call from South Africa to Australia is $1.40 a minute, compared to the vRoam price of $1.06. The saving compared to pre-paid SIM card rates is about 48%.