I’ll be making two trips to the US this year, which is very unusual for me. This summer I’ll be heading to Pennsylvania, and then this autumn I’ll be going to Disney World. Lucky girl? You better believe it.
While we’re at Disney World, we’d like to have a pair of cell phones so that if our group splits up, and there’s an emergency, we can get in touch with each other. Since some members of the group are talking about going to Sea World, and others to the Universal parks, walkie-talkies won’t do the trick - it’s cell phones or nothing.
We live in Norway, which uses the standard European cell phone frequency band, and that’s different than the one used in the US. Only one of the group has a tri-band cell phone and no one wants to buy a new phone just for this trip - not to mention the roaming charges!
I’ll have a lot more time for shopping while we’re in PA than in FL. Would it be possible for me to buy two cell phones that use pre-paid cards while we’re in Pennsylvania, and just keep them in the boxes until we get to Florida? As in, will they work? Will the call charges turn out to be obscene?
:: rereads OP, sees walkie-talkies are out ::
There goes my idea.
Perhaps you could get a few used and unlocked GSM-1900-only phones on eBay or Kijiji or whatever? They’d be fine for populated US areas, and might be cheaper because most phones these days are multiband. Then you could stuff a prepaid SIM in each one.
I just looked on eBay and you can sort the phones there by all sorts of features. There are also SIMs.
Not sure how prepaid does roaming, but why not get two prepaid phones once you get to Florida? I did a quick search and found a refurb phone including $25 prepaid airtime for $29.99. With the $1/day prepaid plan you get unlimited mobile-to-mobile.
Fritz is right a tracfone style of prepaid is the best way to go.
With this style of prepaid they are generally pretty cheap. $15 for a cheap model as Fritz mentioned. They are usually basic. You can call and text and thats pretty much it. They still have the a calling list so if you bought two you can program the number for your other party into it so remembering the number shouldn’t be an issue.
As for activation some phones will have a limit to the amount of time that the phone will stay active. Net10, one style I used to have, would only work for 90 days before you needed to buy a minute card. (The minutes would add active time.) The way around this would be to get the phones in PA and then activate them in FL. These style are sold all around the US and they will ask you what area code you would like them to be assigned to. With mine it asked for a ZIP code.
They way that these phone will get you though is the minutes are generally expensive but with your application that shouldn’t be an issue. Having a long distance relationship at the time I would run out of minutes quickly. You could probably buy two 30 or 60 minutes cards and be fine.
Sounds like everyone has chimed in with exactly the same sort of stuff I would have said… but I did want to comment that there are other prepaid phones out there.
We’re looking at a pair of T-Mobile phones for the kids (for emergency contacts etc.). Those are also quite cheap (the web price for their most basic phone is about 20 dollars apiece) and readily available. I don’t recall what the differences are for Tmobile vs. Tracphones as far as costs go; I know Tmobile was better as far as how long your unused “minutes” last, than Verizon’s prepaid.
You’ll definitely want to make sure whatever you pick allows texting (I think all phones do nowadays) - when in the various parks, it can often be noisy enough that it’s tough to hear a phone conversation (or even to hear it ringing). Texting was a tremendous help when we were there a couple of years ago.
After reading this thread I went and checked the t-mobile site to look a their pre-paid plans.
This brings up a bit of a hijack question for me. Given that t-mobile offers a pay as you go plan for $1/day that includes long distance, roaming and unlimited minutes, why would anyone get a service plan? At $1/day you are paying pretty much the same price as their cheapest service plan and you aren’t tied into a two year agreement.
It doesn’t actually include unlimited minutes, per their site: http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/Prepaid-Plans.aspx
the dollar a day gets you calls that cost 10 cents per minute (the unlimited calling is not until after 7 PM). And of course text messages cost extra. But yeah, really good point, this makes the prepaid look a lot more attractive than a contract plan for a lot of users.
We’ll be sticking with Verizon (and contracts) for the time being due to coverage issues (and their prepaid/pay as you go aren’t attractive).
I’d say that anyone who uses their phone a lot would find a contract price is cheaper. More casual users can probably do better with prepaid.
Lessee: we pay 60 a month for our 2 phones, and that includes 700 minutes. The prepaid from Tmobile, for daily use, would be 60 dollars for the buck a day for each phone. Say we used each phone only on 15 days a month, that’s 15/phone times 2, = 30 dollars a month. If we used 200 minutes, that’s another 20 dollars, so a total of 50 dollars. Cheaper. Use another 100 minutes, there’s breakeven (without adding extra daily charges).
Your cell phone company may be willing to rent you some phones to use in the US. Verizon Wireless, a US company whose infrastructure is completely incompatible with much of the rest of the world, does that for customers traveling overseas.
