Study Abroad and Phone Service

newmassdad
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:03:06 +0000

A few comments:


if you are taking a US cell phone with you and plan to buy a sim card locally, this will only work if TWO conditions are met: (1) it must be a GSM phone. That means no Cingular phones, which are CDMA. (2) it must be unlocked. Most phones in the US are sold locked, meaning sim cards from other carriers will not work, including any in Europe. You can often download an unlocking code from the internet for a few dollars, though.
roaming costs if you take your US phone overseas are exhorbitant: Europe is at least $1/minute (memories of 15 years ago?). Triple that for India and China.
Skype is a bargain and can work fine. I’ve used it for business calls all over asia. My D has been in Bolivia for the summer, and that is the way we talk. If she’s at an internet cafe, we’ll skype (yes, used as a verb) for free. Sometimes the delay is a pain, frequently not. At her apartment, we’ll call her land line using “skype out” for about $0.12/minute, and the call quality has without exception been like a regular landline call.
a few neat features of skype are: cheap or free conference calling; chat and file transfers.