CUBIC TELECOM, a Dublin-based company which offers cheaper mobile phone roaming internationally, has received a €500,000 investment from Enterprise Ireland.

The company will focus the money on RD and expansion in Asian and Australian markets. Ten new jobs have also been created in the past year, with more likely to come.

“Customers coming from outside Europe into Europe are part of a market where there’s incredible demand for our product,” said Pat Phelan, director of product and innovation at Cubic Telecom.

“We’re planning to open an office in the USA, and this will help with that, as well as doing local deals overseas.”

According to Mr Phelan, data will be the main focus of the company in the future, with people travelling to Europe being a particular target. He said the push they were making in Asia and Australia was due to the extortionate rates customers travelling from there pay, in some cases as much as $21/MB of data.

Cubic Telecom’s service works through a special SIM card that behaves like a local connection in more than 230 countries. This means users get local rates, which can reduce costs by upwards of 70 per cent depending on their origin and location.

The company has struck deals with network operators in each country it serves, allowing it to connect using its infrastructure. This requires it to have a small amount of its own hardware in each country. Mr Phelan said some of the investment would be used to fund this.

“We’ll be expanding our technical team rapidly, and they’ll be travelling around doing installations and RD on the other side of the world.”