So day three of my MAXroam road test (read the introduction, day one and day two if you haven’t already), and having been up first thing to catch a ridiculously early flight from London City Airport and been rushing around for the rest of the day I was now settled into my hotel room in Jersey. Seeing as I was technically roaming (even though the Channel Islands are still within the UK numbering plan) I thought it was time to see if I could get my MAXroam SIM and account up and running.

I popped the SIM in my trusty SIM-unlocked BlackBerry Pearl. My aim? To see if I could make a voice call successfully to my other handset.

Heading back over to the MAXroam website and logging into my account, I saw that I’d been allocated a mobile number in Belgium. I assumed this was my base number, but I was more interested in the feature MAXroam offers whereby you can get a local number in quite a few cities around the world. I clicked the button, and it broke again. ‘ An error occured during communication with server!’, apparently. A little drop-box appeared but no countries were listed.

Hey ho, not the end of the world. Checking my BlackBerry, which had after what seemed like an age finally booted up, It’d successfully registered on the relatively new Cable & Wireless GSM network in Jersey. Good stuff. So, as per my day one post about following instructions, I grabbed the welcome pack and read up on making a call. There were two sets of instructions, slightly different, but on the subject of making a call it had this to say:

1. Always dial the full International phone number, excluding “00″ or “+”

OK, so I dialled my UK Three number in the format it said. No +44 or 0044, just 44 followed by the number (obviously missing the first zero).

2. Even if you are making a local call use the country code + area code + local number. Then press the send key

I get it :)

3. Wait about 5-10 seconds and your phone will ring. Answer this.

I waited, then after a few seconds a message popped up: ‘Call failed, please try again’ with another message rather annoyingly over the top ‘Sim call barred’. As MAXroam is using a callback service, I’d come to expect this. However, nothing in the instructions said I might see these rather confusing messages.

Then a few (5-10) seconds later another message popped up: ‘*182*44(number I dialled)# (ok)’

That’s a USSD message. Again, I half expected to see it, but for the average user it’s a little daunting.

And then? Nothing. So I gave it a minute or so, and tried again. The same things happened, then nothing. No call back.

I gave up again for a while, and rattled off another email to the guys at MAXroam. Whilst normally I’d fiddle around and try all sorts of combinations of number formats to get this working, I was planning to test the serviceas a ‘normob’ user – and not someone who necessarily knows what he’s doing :)

Stay tuned for day four of the road test – and see whether I got it working.

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