<p>We are going to Europe next month, and I’m wondering about the situation with using our cell phones there. Anyone with experience with this? Thanks.</p>
<p>You should really call your cell phone company with this question. Even if your phone worked in Europe, your phone co. could charge you ridiculous prices.</p>
<p>Go to <a href=“http://www.mobal.com%5B/url%5D”>www.mobal.com</a>. You can buy an international phone cheaply there and use it with their plan, which is kinda pricey unless you are staying in the UK, because they give you a UK phone number. Or you can buy a SIM card on Ebay or in Europe or at <a href=“http://www.telestial.com%5B/url%5D”>www.telestial.com</a> and put it in the phone. Those provide pretty cheap service. Most Mobal phones are unlocked, which means they work on any SIM card, but if by chance yours turns out not to be unlocked, go to <a href=“http://www.mobileliberation.com%5B/url%5D”>www.mobileliberation.com</a> and for a couple of bucks they will email you the code you need to key in, in order to unlock it and use a different SIM card.</p>
<p>You should probably check with your cell phone company, and I will gladly defer to anyone with more experience, but we live in Germany and our regular cell phones will not work in the U.S. We can buy expensive dual or tri-band phones that will work in the U.S. and it may work the same way in reverse. </p>
<p>If you really need a cell phone while you’re here, In Germany (and I think elsewhere in Europe) you can buy what we call card phones for less than 100 Euros. They have a replaceable SIM card with a prepaid amount of euro (15-60) that you can use until the amount is used up. If you use it while “roaming” in another country, it just uses up the euro faster. I think they have something similar in the U.S. now…It feels odd that we’re not sure about things like that in the states now… </p>
<p>I hope this helps.</p>
<p>We have Cingular phones, which could have been upgraded to use internationally by paying a higher monthly fee. After researching it, we got the phone from mobal.com instead. It’s been great! We paid $49 for the phone three years ago. We pay a flat $1 per minute for calls, which is charged to our credit card. Btwn trips the phone just sits quietly in a box costing us nothing. No monthly fee, no pre-paid SIM card that expires in 30 days the way the US pre-paid phones work. Interestingly, the phone has a London number. Apparently that type of pricing is not available with a US number.</p>
<p>I did a fair amount of research on this about a month ago when trying to decide if we were going to get a phone for my son traveling to France. The telestial site aparent mentioned is an excellent site to learn about all the different phones and locked vs. unlocked. It was my impression from reading these websites that unlocked phones are not the norm if you buy your phone through a service in the US. If you don’t have a tri band GSM phone, your cell phone service provider will rent you a phone but they are almost as expensive as buying one and then the price per minute is quite high. </p>
<p>The option we were going to go with was buying an unlocked GSM tri-band phone and then getting a SIM card for the particular country. That way if you travel to other countries at another time, you can buy a SIM card for that country. I remember reading about an all inclusive SIM card for people who travel from country to country frequently. To make it even more confusing you can sign up for a phone card or buy one and dial that access number from your tri-band phone - it’s a little complex but it does save money- you end up paying somewhere between 12 to 25 cents a minute. We ended up signing up for the Globalphone card mentioned on telestial and my son bought several phone cards in France. He said his friends with phones had trouble getting through many times but their remote location may have been the cause. There were a few times when having a phone would have made things easier on him and given me a little more peace of mind but he did just fine without one.</p>
<p>If you have T-Mobile service and have a dual or tri-band phone (most of the newer ones are that), you can add international service to your plan. It does not cost anything, but the minutes used in most European countries run 99 cents per minute. My daughter is in Europe now, using her phone (a little too much) and everything has been working fine.</p>
<p>Beware of the charges that are quoted to you for usage. I used my phone in Mexico because the rates were quoted as 99 cents per minute. And that’s what I paid if I made a local call while I was there. But when someone called me (even someone in Mexico), they dialed by US number, which meant the call went to my home system, then to Mexico (at a premium rate), then to my phone. Not only was the charge 99 cents per minute, but almost $5.00 per minute for the “retail” international toll charge (to get the call from my home area to Mexico). It was a bit of a shock.</p>
<p>I think it’s better getting the phone in Europe. The best deal I ever got was in France, where I had a French number and incoming calls were free. The phone rental was either zero or extremely low per day, and outbound calls were very reasonable. I got that at CDG airport.</p>
<p>I’ve also used the prepaid phone, where they send you a telephone and a pre-charged SIM card by mail before you leave. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with these. The bad experiences involved instructions that were sent with the phone that were just NOT what you needed to do to initialize the phone in Europe. With the good experiences, everything went just fine.</p>
<p>My job: international wireless consultant. If I travel A LOT to one place for a job, I actually get a phone in that country and get on a pre-paid plan that may be a little more expensive per minute, but that does not have monthly charges and is still much cheaper than using a US phone. Alsom if I were going to spend more that a few weeks in one place internationally, I’d also get a pre-paid phone there in-country.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the info everyone. I have plenty to look into now.</p>
<p>It probably depends on your carrier, but our T-Mobile international service has been the 99 cents per minute, regardless if the calls were local or back home to the US or received from the US. I am able to track the use on line. Even at 99 cents, the costs add up pretty quickly and I had to remind D to use her prepaid calling card to call home rather than the cell. It has been reassuring for her to have the cell, however, so we can contact her if we really need to.</p>
<p>We have Verizon, and we are going to Italy. I should have said that before.</p>
<p>My D and I spent last summer in Italy. Because she was the youngest student (18) in her singing program, I had to chaperone her. So – my older daughter and I rented an apartment where her program was (Lucca) and took along our two T-mobile phones. We had them unlocked for international service ($.99/minute to the US) but when we got there stopped in at the local mobile phone store (Vodaphone) and bought local SIM cards for each. In went the SIM cards with the local Italian number and we could freely talk back and forth with each other. When we wanted to call home, we took out the Italian SIM card and put back the US computer chip. T-mobile and Cingular, to my knowledge, are the only two US carriers with GSM phones compatible for use in Europe.</p>
<p>Odyssey, your Verizon plan probably won’t work for international calls. What you need is a plan that uses GSM - I think Cingular, ATT & T-Mobile are the only one’s using GSM, unless things have changed. The other thing you need is an “international” or tri-band cell phone – these can be purchased relatively cheaply from eBay if you don’t have a good (inexpensive) discounted option from the cell phone companies. </p>
<p>If you are locked into a Verizon contract or don’t want to change, the alternative would just be to buy prepaid European phones. It kind of depends whether you want phones for your family to use to call each other, or you want phones to use to call back to the US or so friends/family from home can reach you.</p>
<p>I am surprised Cingular charged Texas137 more for the international plan - I have cingular and there wasn’t any charge for use to enable international calling - though we purchased our own phones & just swapped out the SIM chips. Cingular’s international rates can be pricey - especially since you end up paying both their “roaming” charge AND a long distance charge. But international text messaging is the same as local – so when my daughter was overseas I just bought her the message plan with the highest alloted number of messages. </p>
<p>But it depends on where you are – I had my phone in France and made a few local calls (to France, from my cell phone, so I would be paying the long-distance rates) - and I really didn’t end up with a huge phone bill.</p>
<p>Verizon does not have the GSM phones. We have Verizon also and the person we talked to said we would be better off getting our own phone because of the high price we would pay having a U.S. number.</p>
<p>Digi, was there a particular company that you had trouble with using the prepaid phone and card? Is the phone rental in Europe common? - I never saw any information about that - that seems like a really good option.</p>
<p>i have sprint, and my phone actually has worked in spain & italy. it tells you how much it is going to cost per minute to make the call before it goes through. that said, its very expensive, and a phone card has never let me down. just make sure you purchase the RIGHT phone card. dont get one for calling mexico when you want one for calling the US… or dont get one that only works from china to the US if you are in europe. (obviously you would never try to do that, but some guy selling a phone card on the street could easily tell you it was one thing when it was really another) have a fun trip!!!</p>
<p>I think sopranosmom has the best plan of all here. Once a phone is unlocked, it can use a local SIM card (prepaid SIMs can be purchased abroad or you can buy one before you go - for example with <a href=“http://www.telestial.com/[/url]”>http://www.telestial.com/</a> (just an example, not a recommendation).</p>
<p>You need to make sure that (1) you have a GSM phone and (2) it’s one that can work at the frequency that countries other than the US uses. The US GSM frequency is 1900 MHz and most other countries in the world use 1800 MHz.</p>
<p>Try googling (unlock <phone-brand> <phone-model>) and see what shows up. There are services that do this for you (and it’s legal). Depending on the model, it will probably cost between $5 (do-it-yourself with just a code) and $25 (must send you phone in).</phone-model></phone-brand></p>
<p>This is what I will do next trip!!</p>
<p>
well, it was 3 years ago and may have had something to do with the particular plan or phone (or Alzheimers). We didn’t actually use Cingular for int’l calling; we bought a mobal.com phone.</p>
<p>Citibank cardmembers get a free international cell phone rental. No deposit, no surcharge, no international roaming…works in 150 countries and 500 networks.</p>
<p><a href=“International Cell phone rental - Rent or lease a GSM cellular phone”>www.planetfone.com/apply.asp</a></p>
<p>or call 1-888-988-4777 with your citicard # ready for I.D.</p>
<p>calmom:
</p>
<p>I called Cingular a month ago to ask them to unlock D’s phone, and they told I can get “international roaming” (whatever that is) for additional $5 a month, plus of course the roaming charges. We decided to go with “buy an unlocked quad-band phone on ebay, and insert a local SIM card” plan instead…</p>
<p>BTW, they say that many phones from Cingular are not locked - one may want to check it (inserting a T-mobile SIM card) before buying the “unlock service”.</p>
<p>T-mobile unlocks the phones for its customers for free if they just call and ask, no need to pay somebody for services.</p>
<p>We used our Cingular phones in Italy, France, and London without any difficulty in late May. All we had to do was enable them through Cingular. If you pay a monthly fee, it’s $1/minute; if you don’t it’s $1.50/minute. (For our plan, anyway.) It ended up costing an extra $200 for the three weeks—which sounds like a lot until you realize our normal phone bill for my husband’s biz stuff is $150, and at one point he spent 25 minutes on the phone stepping a co-worker through a bug fix. And most of the people doing business with my husband didn’t even realize he wasn’t at home for those three weeks. (I mainly used the phone to call my D–who was also traveling in Europe, sometimes with us, sometimes not.)</p>