Blog of the week: blog.roam4free.ie. In true Rebel County style, Corkman Pat Phelan would be proud to be considered a renegade in the world of telecoms.

His Irish-licensed telecoms group, Cubic Telecom, has made a habit out of introducing services that shake up the status quo and that maverick style has been carried through to his blog.

Ostensibly this is the blog of Phelan's Roam4Free business, which is not waiting around for the EU to tackle mobile phone roaming costs. Instead Roam4Free is working to provide international travellers with a sim card for their phone which would significantly reduce their roaming charges.

You are just as likely to read about his other business interests - Cubic Telecom, his FoneHome low-cost calling shops or his AllFreeCalls international calling service.

Although he only established the blog last summer, it didn't take Phelan long to find his niche. He likes to keep his finger on the pulse of emerging communications trends and he provides a useful snapshot of what's happening with voice over IP (VoIP), mobile telephony, web services and how all these technologies are being mashed up by a new breed of service providers.

Unlike some bloggers, though, he's not star-struck by the sector he covers and he's not afraid to call a spade a spade. Most recently he was happy to call the Twitter SMS blogging service a waste of time while many other information junkies still sing its praises.

Phelan has some pretty ambitious plans to disrupt the current telecoms business models, which he believes are fleecing users for the benefit of big business. For that alone, this blog is well worth staying subscribed to.

Even if Phelan doesn't deliver on his vision of a fluid market for telecoms services where consumers can easily choose the lowest cost service available, it will be well worth watching the drama unfold.