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Hey, I talked to a BestBuy guy, that said you can get pre pay cells, by orange in uk and plug in your sim. card. he said its the cheapest way to go

Joel

I used thee Roamsimple.com service 2x already. Once when i went to Germany and again when i went to China. I purhcased their v180 refurb set - it was actually not bad and for $40 how could i have gone wrong. It seems to be they are honest in their pricing and not looking to rip off customers as mobal is - and with mobal phones you can only use their sim card with their phone as they lock their phones. between the two i obviously selected roamsimple

cheers

Thanks, Nick.

Unlocked phone was a plus, and disclosure that they use T-Mobile's network in the UK another plus -- from the maps at the mobile company sites, it looks like T-Mobile has better coverage for where we will be than does Mobal, and much better than Orange.

Check this site for good unbiased info on any country that uses SIM cards. http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en

Hi - i think you should consider this postpaid service that i found - its better than prepaid - it has to be the most convenient way to use a SIM card internationally. You don't have to prebuy minutes and you dont' need to worry about airtime credit becuae all your usage gets billed directly to your credit card - also you get the benefit of you cell number in advance rather than waiting to get it overseas - check out www.roamsimple.com

cheers

roamsimple may be simple but not cheap. I looked at Italy prices and they are a lot higher than getting the SIM directly from the carrier.

I've been considering pulling the trigger with www.telestial.com .... looks great to me.

Decided to order the Roam Simple phone after exchanging some e-mails with them. $9 SIM + $40 V180 refurb quad-band Motophone + $15 shipping. Ordered at 10am, received it by 10 the next morning .. not bad.

Rates are good for pay-as-you-go. Orange, etc. have a lot of rates / plans which show up on the very thorough Italian site referenced above, but it seems nearly impossible to figure out which is which.

For where we will be, the Telekom network used by Roam Simple has next-to-the-best coverage among the plans I've looked at.

It's nice to know the phone number now, vs. waiting until we are there.

Why not add international calling to your existing phone in the US? Is that more expensive?

Eli, not all US carriers offer international calling from abroad. And if they did, you would still have to have a quad band phone to be able to access it.

My US phone is a Verizon CDMA phone -- doesn't work in Europe. $40+15 for a phone+shipping, and $9 for access (the SIM chip) seems rather reasonable.

I haven't had experience personally with a US Telekom phone, but have heard that they are usually locked and you have to pay to unlock them to use a different SIM; from what I've seen, their rates for international use of a US phone can be steep; IF they treat your calls as originating from your US number, that would make them all very long distance, wouldn't it?

The comment about the Italy rates re Roam Simple - i agree they are high but think of the convenience factor - you get a number in advance and you don't have to worry about airtime credit as you do with telestial - what happens when you run out of minutes? how easy is it to top up your minutes in the middle of the night? you need to find a recharge vendor - consider the language barrier or you have to log on line to buy more credits - where you gonna find internet access and how much will that cost? prepaid is good if you are watcing your budget but i'm more for convenience and peace of mind....happy holidays...summers almost here

Nick, that's why I like Mobal, too. I only want to pay for what I use, and be able to use it whenever, wherever. And if you are visiting several countries, you don't need to change SIM cards when you cross the border. And Mobal's costs are the same - $49 for the phone, including SIM chip and permanent phone number, plus $10-15 for shipping.

Nancy - Mobal is good but their phones are locked to their SIM cards and have you checked out their airtime rates - expensive...this is not the case with Roam Simple - they give you a quad band phone for $49 - Mobal offers it at $99

I picked up the ekit.com Siemens A55 setup. Has $20 loaded on their basic SIM card, should last at least a few days.

I went with roam simple. The idea of hiring a phone and paying their higher rates didnt appeal to me. The guys at roam simple were easy to deal with and delivery was quick! Prepaid just wasnt an option.

Hi,

I've used callineurope.com during my trip to Europe, they are simply the cheapest up there, thumb up!

Fred

ATT is great for internationa roaming if you are already a customer. Tmobile is the same.

Motorola RAZR is quadband and only $100.

You keep your US number, its all billed to your account.

Your friends and family can always call you no matter where you are in the world. They pay their rate to call your US number, you pay $.99-$2.29 per minuted depending on the country you are in.

Plus you can get the RAZR unlocked and buy a local sim to put in it if you will be making alot of local calls.

I can't believe some of the comments. We used an Italian SIM in phones we bought used over here.

(note that prices shown are a little higher than the actual amounts we paid as charges were in euros so I rounded the conversion up. We actually paid a little less).

Convenient to have your number before you leave? When we got our number in Italy, I made one .75 (U.S.) call to let my son know we arrived OK and he passed on our number to everyone.

As to price for minutes. $0.20/min for local calls and $0.75 for calling home and that was w/o a special plan that would have reduced the international rate had we paid a small amount for a plan that provided better rates but we only called home twice. On the other hand, we could call each other when we got separated for $.20 or less and we found that calling each other was the biggest use of our phone and resulted in lowest stress (one person waiting with luggage & the other off looking for info or to go to toilet and being delayed returning.

John, where did you buy a used phone? What were you looking for? Do SIM cards work for all phones?

I have Verizon with CDMA, so this is all new for me.

Cate,

You need a GSM phone (AT&T/Cingular or T-Mobile in the U.S. along with having a phone with European frequencies (tri or quad band). You then buy a SIM in the local country or by a multi-country SIM.

The phone must be "unlocked" i.e. not set by the U.S. carrier to limit its use outside of its own network. There are multiple ways to do this - buying an unlocked phone, having carrier do it (they will under some circumstances), doing it yourself or paying to have it done.

Unlocking has no negative effects on the phone or on its use here.

Anyone interested in more info can PM me. It is not rocket science to do all this.

Since I started this thread, I should add some comments on our experience with Roam Simple.

In my view, price (SIM and the refurbished phone) was reasonable, phone and SIM were delivered very promptly.

We didn't do a whole lot of calling while we were in the UK. Our bill for calls and texts came to about $12.50, less than the cost of a round of "sticky toffee pudding" desert for the three of us.

It was very handy to know the phone number ahead of time -- we were able to email it to relatives who were then able to get in touch with us (free incoming calls) immediately upon our arrival.

In some of the more remote parts of the Highlands of Scotland, signal quality wasn't as good as we get at home, but that was due to being remote. In the cities, the T-Mobile network they use was just fine.

We now have a phone which we can get SIMs for, for future trips. We took digital pictures of a few of the text messages we got, since we won't be able to access them here.

I used Roam Simple for a trip to Australia in February. The phone worked a few times in Sydney and then once in Hobart. Other than that, I could not get a signal.

It turned out my Sprint CDMA phone worked in Australia and we ended up using that since it worked everywhere.

I would not recommend Roam Simple.

I used the Roam Simple Australia service recently and it was excellent. Not only was it convenient not to have to worry about the prepaid headaches but the service was clear - no problems. Best thing is that i recieved my phone number in advance of my trip and that was really cool. I purchase a new phone from them and did not the refurb phone. Other than that I would recommend Roam Simple.

I've been doing a little research for my upcoming trip. So far the cheapest rate that I've found is with Geo Sim. They sell a a roaming sim card that you plug into your quad band phone.

http://www.globalsimcard.co.uk/calls_and_coverage.php

I recently purchased my 3rd SIM card from Roam Simple. I really don't think people understand how valuable and convenient it is to have

A ) Post paid service vs a pre paid. I never had to worry about prepaying for minutes or running out of minutes. The Roam Simple service charged my credit card for all my airtime which was awesome.

B ) I received my active SIM within a day and it was active with my phone number attached so I could give it out to all my contacts prior to my trip.

I have tried other services such as these so call wonder glbal SIM's - yes they were cheap but they were prepaid and worst of all they were callback services.

I recommend Roam Simple www.roamsimple.com - I'm a fan and a repeat customer.

Thanks for the info...too bad as they are one of the rare postpaid providers. Personally I use callineurope.com when I travel to Europe. Postpaid, direct dialing, detailed electronic invoice. They work with Vodafone, O2 and TIM and it is active for each of my trip. Roamsimple like them are the few pure "postpaid - direct dialing" providers while all most of the other ones are prepaid and in worse case call back systems.

Mobal is postpaid and requires only the international SIM card that you get when you buy the phone (no changing SIM cards when you cross borders). The UK number is permanent, and you pay only for the time you use (on your credit card). They also have detailed billing available online.

As stated above by others, Mobal is clearly not the way to go. Yes it is postpaid, yes it is direct dialing but have you looked at the calling rates? Anyone can go to http://www.mobal.com/worldphone/ even in the UK (where the SIM card/number is from) the outgoing rates are $1.25/min! One could expect less from the service country. And accross Europe $1.50/min. On this page they advertise very old recommendations by media that now could not recommend such prices and like many others I was seduced reading a Sky mall add one day during a domestic flight. Well, the only way they are still visible and in business is because they spend so much money on advertising ripping off travelers with exorbitant rates. I was a victim! They told me "but the quality of the connection is worth these rates!". All decent and serious providers of travel sim cards also works with the same European carriers (t-mobile, 02, tim, orange...) and their rates are much more economical. The argument of having one sim card in their phone for multiple destinations does not stand here anymore: others have also service attached to a single sim card with roaming rates half their prices, postpaid and direct dialing. Even if buying a sim card for a different country is necessary, the $20 I would pay for it would only give me 15 min of calls with mobal.

Max, I generally use my phone only for emergencies, not for chatting with someone or calling home to check up on things. On at least a couple of trips I haven't used it at all. So what if the per-minute cost is higher if I'm not using it? Per-minute cost isn't the only thing you have to consider. At least I don't have to worry about running out of minutes, or going to any extra expense for different countries, or buying minutes I won't use. I know that if I need it, it is always ready wherever I am, and whatever time it may be. Though it's hard to quantify, that kind of convenience is a benefit for which I'm willing pay. It all comes down to whether a particular calling method suits the way you want to use your phone. If I was going to plan on having long conversations, I might choose a different method. But for my purposes generally, Mobal suits me. Oh yeah, and Rick Steves recommended it. (And I'm not sure what you mean by "very old recommendations by media that now could not recommend such prices", since the rates have been the same since I bought the phone 3 years ago.)