It's not uncommon for family and friends to send toiletries, magazines, photos, and other personal items to our fighting forces in Iraq to help make their time away a bit more tolerable. In essence, it's a way of sending a little bit of home to them.

Alex Filippov, general manager of Long Distance Post, LLC, a distributor of prepaid mobile phones and international long distance calling services, is doing just the opposite. In his own way, he's trying to bring the forces home.

What he is doing is sending his company's newest product, OneSIMCard, to many of the service men and women in military hot spots around the world so that they can call home more easily and more inexpensively. Because calls from faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan are far less costly, troops can spend more time on the phone with family without incurring such a heavy financial burden.

OneSIMCard is a prepaid international SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card that allows users to take their GSM phone overseas and make calls without incurring high roaming charges from their current wireless service provider. OneSIMCard works in over 140 countries worldwide and offers rates that are lower than any competitive SIM card in the industry. In addition, it carries no monthly fees and no expiration of the phone number.

A small printed circuit board that is inserted in any tri- or quad-band GSM phone, OneSIMCard contains subscriber details, security information and a variety of other functions such as memory storage. When a long distance call is made from or to a foreign country, OneSIMCard immediately initiates the call at the low OneSIMCard rate — up to 85% lower than conventional long distance service.

Filippov, who estimates that his company has sent about 500 of these cards to military forces worldwide since July 2007, as well as to various naval ships and aircraft carriers, said that the cards are purchased primarily by family members. His company ships them free to any APO (Army Post Office) address. He will also offer a discount to anyone with a .mil (military) e-mail address.