Cell phones in a foreign country

Factual Questions
1

My wife and I would like to go to Europe, probably within the next 2 years. We’d like to see Amsterdam, Rome, and maybe other sites. We are cell phone idiots - we’ve used them for a half-decade, but neither of us knows what terminology like “GSM” and “sim card” mean. We pay our Verizon bill, and have no problems, so that’s that.

What would be the easiest way to have cell phones in Europe? My guess would be to buy prepaid, cheap cell phones for 20 Euros (or whatever) when we get there. I also realize that in 2 years, cell phone technology might be light years beyond its present state.

Thanks.

Joe

2

If you want to use your cell phone overseas get rid of Verizon. All of the US cell phone companies suck but for international use, Verizon is useless. Their system is unique to the US.

You can get an AT&T phone and buy an international calling plan. (Don’t ever accuse me of promoting AT&T). The website will give you a chart of international calling rates. Depending on the country they can vary from $.49/min to $3.99/min. Yes, it does add up quickly.

All that being said, you can make a better, clearer, quicker cell phone call from Cambodia to the US than from many points within the US. The USA may have the worst and most privative cell phone service in the world for a country that tries to pretend to be technologically advanced.

3

I had a quad band mobile phone (it was the Razr or however you spell it). I was able to use it anywhere I went in Europe and most other places as well. Calling outside of the US was expensive, my plan had a website that listed the countries and fees.

4

In my experience, theres a good chance your phone will work, but the costs invovled make it pretty much for emergencies only.

Coming the other way, Europe to US, its worth getting a cheap pay-as-you-go phone for local calls. But I don’t think you get the really cheap pay-as-you-go deals in Europe (which is weird as generally mobile costs and technology are much better there).

5

A coupe of definitions… GSM is a communication standard (think of it like AM and FM radio). A SIM card is a small (roughly 1/2" x 3/4") plastic card with a bit of circuitry on it. They are inserted into a GSM phone and are what gives it a phone number and connection to the network.

Your best best is to buy an unlocked 4 band GSM phone (GSM is the standard everywhere except the US and Japan). There is GSM service in the US from AT&T and T-Mobile, but Verizon uses a different technology and phones that work with Verizon will not work on a GSM system.

I have a Sony 520i which is a 4 band GSM phone. It cost me about $200 in Dubai. Buying unlocked phones in the US will be more difficult, but I am sure there are online places where you can get them. Being unlocked means you can insert any company’s SIM card in any country. A locked phone will only work with a specific company’s SIM card.

The 4 bands are 850Mhz, 900, 1800 and 1900. (Going from memory here). More or less, most of the world uses 900/1800, the US uses 1900 and the 850 band is the newest and is used in a few places. Thus a 4 band phone will work on any GSM system worldwide.

When you arrive in a country, you can buy a local SIM card that you insert into the phone. This gives you a local phone number and usually a bit of credit… sometimes as much as the SIM card costs. So for €20 you get a SIM card with perhaps €10 of calling credit. If you use up all that, you can buy scratch off cards with a code to add more credit.

Outside the US you will never pay to receive calls… that is a weird and uniquely US thing.

Having a local phone makes it much nicer to travel. A couple months ago my wife and I were in Tunisia. The first morning we bought a Tunisian SIM card ($5), added credit ($10) and for two weeks we had a phone. Being able to make a hotel booking from a train is much better than finding a phone office and using coins. :slight_smile:

Note that many pre-paid systems will not let you roam so a German SIM may not work in Italy. This is not always the case tho. A Czech SIM works almost everywhere (even Thailand).

6

FWIW, Congress recently passed a law which makes it mandatory for cell phone companies to give you unlocking instructions. I unlocked my Cingular quad band phone and used an Australian SIM card for the 3 months that I was there. Just call up your GSM cell phone company and tell them you’re planning on travelling.

7

[QUOTE=Desert Nomad]
Note that many pre-paid systems will not let you roam so a German SIM may not work in Italy.
[/QUOTE]

This is worth repeating. Remember, although distances in Europe might seem small if you’re coming from America, and despite the EU and the euro, there are still dozens of countries with dozens of different ways of doing things. So if you’re doing a whistle-stop tour - Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Barcelona, or something, with a couple of days in each - you could easily hit six countries in a couple of weeks, so you won’t want to be stuck with, say, a Dutch pre-pay phone for the rest of the trip.

8

I have a Quad-band phone and it’s worked just fine in New Zealand, the US, and Mexico, of all places. In the US it was roaming on AT&T, T-Mobile, or Cingular depending where I was.

My advice, if you ever find yourself in Australia, is not to bring your phone with you; just get a cheap pre-paid phone here, but a pre-paid cap deal on it, and save yourself a fortune in international roaming fees. And you’ve got a spare phone if you need it when you get back to the US, provided you can get it unlocked before you go (Which costs between $50-$100, depending on the network).

9

I know of three ways to do this, and I have done two of them.

(First, a SIM card is a small card (a little smaller than an SD card) that fits into a GSM phone. Unlike other phone technologies, your GSM account identity is linked to your SIM card, not the phone. You can take your SIM card, tied to your account, put it in any, phone and that phone will ring when someone calls your phone number. If a phone is unlocked, that means it will work with any phone company; a locked phone just works with the company that sold it, like AT&T.)

I ordered a cheap unlocked phone with a SIM card from Mobal (mobal.com) which is a UK firm with a New York contact number. The phone number is a UK phone number, and I used it in France. The charges were something like $1 a minute within the country and $2-3 a minute to call US. There are no other service charges so the phone just sits in my drawer at home between trips at no cost.

I just got back from Egypt. I could also use the Mobal phone there. However, I bought a local SIM card at Radio Shack in Cairo for about $6 plus a pre-paid card for about $5 and put the SIM card in the same phone, then was paying the equivalent of something like $0.30 a minute for local calls, plus our contacts locally could call us without making a long distance call.

You can also get a multi-band GSM phone from a US company and then pay international roaming. I don’t know how much that costs but you generally need to sign up a 1- or 2-year contract so it’s not a good solution if you just need something for travel.

10

[QUOTE=Shalmanese]
FWIW, Congress recently passed a law which makes it mandatory for cell phone companies to give you unlocking instructions. I unlocked my Cingular quad band phone and used an Australian SIM card for the 3 months that I was there. Just call up your GSM cell phone company and tell them you’re planning on travelling.
[/QUOTE]
I just spent a few minutes googling things like “Congress cell phone unlock” and I find references to a 2007 proposed bill that would require providers to be clearer in pricing and to prorate penalties for breaking contracts, but I couldn’t find anything saying that providers are now required to tell you how to unlock the phone.

Would you be able to provide a cite for that?

11

Not true. I have a Verizon phone that works about everywhere but Japan, and my old Verizon phone worked in a number of countries.

12

[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
(First, a SIM card is a small card (a little smaller than an SD card) that fits into a GSM phone. Unlike other phone technologies, your GSM account identity is linked to your SIM card, not the phone. You can take your SIM card, tied to your account, put it in any, phone and that phone will ring when someone calls your phone number. If a phone is unlocked, that means it will work with any phone company; a locked phone just works with the company that sold it, like AT&T.)
[/QUOTE]

Eh?

What systems are there other than SIM cards?

13

[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
Eh?

What systems are there other than SIM cards?
[/QUOTE]
North American CDMA and iDEN systems, as well as the older TDMA and AMPS analogue systems, do not require SIM cards. The user’s phone number and identity information is programmed into the phone hardware, rather than into a SIM card.

(There have been a few phones that could use both GSM and one or more of these other systems, and they had a SIM card. But they also had the other systems’ identity info.)

14

[QUOTE=susan]
Not true. I have a Verizon phone that works about everywhere but Japan, and my old Verizon phone worked in a number of countries.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve been a Verizon Wireless customer for something like five years and this was news to me until I looked it up. Verizon does indeed offer phones that will work on GSM networks and corresponding calling plans for them.

15

You can also rent a phone from Verizon that will work overseas. We just got back today from a UK trip in which we did that. They sent us a phone with a local number. We then forwarded our US cell phone to that phone.

16

Last year when I went to Ireland I called Verizon (my cell phone carrier) and asked if my phone would work over there. It would not but all was not lost. They gave me an 800 #. I was able to rent a phone to take to across the pond. They Fed-Exed me a phone along with a carrying case, and all the plug adapters for various countries around the world. I was also able to have it set up (no extra charge) for my U.S. number to be forwarded to my rental phone so my friends back home wouldn’t have to try to remember a long foreign number. When I got home I just put the phone in a box they gave me for the return shipment back to them. It really was a great set-up.
Have fun in Europe!

17

[QUOTE=Desert Nomad]
A coupe of definitions… GSM is a communication standard (think of it like AM and FM radio). A SIM card is a small (roughly 1/2" x 3/4") plastic card with a bit of circuitry on it. They are inserted into a GSM phone and are what gives it a phone number and connection to the network.

Your best best is to buy an unlocked 4 band GSM phone (GSM is the standard everywhere except the US and Japan). There is GSM service in the US from AT&T and T-Mobile, but Verizon uses a different technology and phones that work with Verizon will not work on a GSM system.

I have a Sony 520i which is a 4 band GSM phone. It cost me about $200 in Dubai. Buying unlocked phones in the US will be more difficult, but I am sure there are online places where you can get them. Being unlocked means you can insert any company’s SIM card in any country. A locked phone will only work with a specific company’s SIM card.

The 4 bands are 850Mhz, 900, 1800 and 1900. (Going from memory here). More or less, most of the world uses 900/1800, the US uses 1900 and the 850 band is the newest and is used in a few places. Thus a 4 band phone will work on any GSM system worldwide.

When you arrive in a country, you can buy a local SIM card that you insert into the phone. This gives you a local phone number and usually a bit of credit… sometimes as much as the SIM card costs. So for €20 you get a SIM card with perhaps €10 of calling credit. If you use up all that, you can buy scratch off cards with a code to add more credit.

Outside the US you will never pay to receive calls… that is a weird and uniquely US thing.

Having a local phone makes it much nicer to travel. A couple months ago my wife and I were in Tunisia. The first morning we bought a Tunisian SIM card ($5), added credit ($10) and for two weeks we had a phone. Being able to make a hotel booking from a train is much better than finding a phone office and using coins. :slight_smile:

Note that many pre-paid systems will not let you roam so a German SIM may not work in Italy. This is not always the case tho. A Czech SIM works almost everywhere (even Thailand).
[/QUOTE]

That’s one approach. I need to have a cell phone number that is the same no matter where I am in the world (for work reasons), so your method won’t work for me. I went with a standard GSM phone (T-mobile). Although calls are expensive outside the U.S., it does work in most countries.

Ed

18

If you need a single number, get a US number and have it forwarded to your mobile. Then when you change SIMs change the forwarding so you get a single number for your business to call you and still have a local number for local calls.

19

[QUOTE=Desert Nomad]
If you need a single number, get a US number and have it forwarded to your mobile. Then when you change SIMs change the forwarding so you get a single number for your business to call you and still have a local number for local calls.
[/QUOTE]

That’s too much trouble, since the calls I do make from outside the U.S. are mostly reimbursed by my company anyway. If I actually had to pay for a lot of overseas calls, I’m sure I would work out a more economical system. But for now, the simplest thing that works is best.

Ed

20

When we went overseas, we took over regular AT& T mobile phones which we had unlocked prior to travel and just bought SIM cards with local Turkish numbers. We sent an email to family saying that in the event of an emergency they could contact us at the following numbers.