Cell phones in Europe
 

Hi, we are traveling 17 days in Europe: Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, Itlay (cruise). What is the best option in picking a cell phone? do I actually purchase the phone in Europe or do I bring a phone and purchase sim cards?
thanks!

Buy an <u>unlocked</u> GSM phone with 900/1800 mHz bands.

Buy a SIM from united-mobile.com

We purchased, in this country, a phone from Mobal, www.mobalrental.com, for $49. It works in 140 countries, but not the U.S. and you are charged only for the time used. It works beautifully and the phone is yours forever.

...and if you purchase the mobal phone you pay outrageously high rates both to make and receive calls.

Now if you want the phone just for emergencies that is okay.

If you want a phone because you want to use it, the united mobile option is by far the best...you get free receptionof calls throughout all of Western Europe for the one time outlay...calls made are moderately expensive but there are ways to beat that too.

Do a search on riiing and read all the great but more importantly correct (unlike some of the junk put up here) I have provided regarding this.

BTW your own mobile phone company at home, wherever home is, might do a better job for you than mobal but that is something you can look up.

I use my own phone which happens to work in Europe so cannot help you other than to say that the first thing I think you should do is ask yourself if you actually need a cellphone in Europe (since you don't own one which works there as well as here) or do you just <b>want</b> one?

There are no &quot;wrong&quot; answers to this question but if the &quot;saving money&quot; issue is that major for you then the question may be even more relevant.

There are no wrong opinions...everybody is entitled to their opinion and as I noted the question about what is right for a particular person is dependent on a number of factors. Most importantly when it comes to mobile phones, to give advice, one has to kinow just what the mobile phone is wanted for. Also one has to know whether one's only carrier allows international roaming, whether that carrier is GSM, whether the person has a GSM phone with the proper frequencies yada yada yada.

However, one reads a great deal of stuff thrown out by people on various topics that is downright wrong and those are wrong answers.

If I say that in my opinion mobal is not such a great deal if you really want to have a usable mobile phone, that is an opinion. I can't answer for what people consider to be &quot;convenience&quot; and place a monetary value on that. I also can't answer, for example, what the future holds. Is this a one trip to Europe and never again or does the person go to Europe annually? That might affect the &quot;best&quot; solution to the problem.

Finally nobody knows what the future holds. Currently there is a great deal of controversy going on in the eu as it is apparent the eu will, in the very near future, pass legislation that will curtail the asininely high roaming rates put on intra European calls throughout the eu...that might mean a company such as united mobile AKA riiing may not be the best buy for a muli country visit to Europe but nobody, as noted, can predict the future.

In my opinion, if you want a functioning mobile phone for a multi country trip to Europe and want to be able to be reached, at reasonable rates, 24/7 the best solution is Robespierre's.

Still a bit confused on the cell phone issue and could use a little help, especially on what a SIM card does.

If I'm reading Robespierre's suggestion correctly, I can: 1) purchase any GMS phone anyplace, 2) make sure it's &quot;unlocked&quot; (how can I tell?), and then 3)purchase a SIM card from united-mobile, which will give me one European phone number AND service at the per minute cost they quote on their web site. Is this correct?

(Note--I have tried to &quot;post&quot; this message several times but keep getting an error message...so I apologize profusely if it actually went through numerous times.)

bookmarking

The SIM is what determines which phone rings when someone calls you. I'm leaving out some technical steps here, but the short version is that you can take your SIM out of one phone and put it in another phone and when your friend rings your number, the one your SIM is in will ring.

The remainder of your analysis is correct, provided that the phone will work on 900 and 1800 mHz. The only way I know of to be <u>certain</u> that a phone is unlocked is to install a SIM other than the provider's, and see if you get an error message.

bookmarking

Robespierre--Your answers are so helpful! So when you purchase a cell phone, it's just the SIM card in the phone that &quot;connects&quot; you to a particular provider's service (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.)...that I can buy any phone, remove the SIM card from it, and put in a different provider's SIM card and the phone will &quot;connect&quot; me through that new provider (such as United-Mobile)? I ask because you apparently can't buy a cell phone around here without it being tied to a provider; and if I can just pop out the card and replace it, this is a whole lot easier than it sounds.

Also, what is meant by &quot;unlocked&quot;?

Thanks again!

A &quot;locked&quot; phone will accept <i>only</i> the providing carrier's SIMs. So if you buy a phone from Virgin Mobile, for example, it won't work with a united-mobile.com SIM unless you get it unlocked.

The only carriers in the U.S. who routinely equip customers with GSM phones are Cingular and T-Mobile. The rest will sell you a GSM phone, but at an exorbitant price.

The best way to finesse the entire issue is to buy a <font color="blue"><b>GSM</b></font> phone for <font color="blue"><b>900/1800 gHz</b></font> that's been <font color="blue"><b>unlocked</b></font> from a vendor on eBay with lots of good feedback.

Robespierre--You are such a help! Before I buy on e-Bay, I have to ask about a posting I read awhile back, stating that even with the plug adaptors you need in Europe for anything, someone said they couldn't charge their cell phone--it wouldn't take the charge. Was that a lot of bull that I can just forget about?

Not sure if you are referring to the recent thread I was asking about all this.

BUT I did buy a cell phone on eBay that is unlocked - no SIM card at all. The only problem I had with the purchase was that the charger that it came with was only good in US (voltage 120) So I bought a dual voltage charger at Target. This is different than the plugs but that is solved the usual way with the adaptor kit we have. I am not sure if some other seller or some other phone would have had the correct kind of charger. Probably but I was going for a very simple, cheap, no frills phone.

My husband now has the phone in Thailand and he has bought a SIM card there for about $5 and it works. That did not include very many minutes but he can add more and incoming calls are free.

When we get to Portugal in a few weeks we will buy a Portuguese SIM card. Then just email or maybe call home to the US with our new number.

This seems to be the best solution for us - thanks to all the good advice on Fodors.

Hi everyone. I am in this same boat with everyone else. I just got off the phone with Cingular. I am considering getting domestic service with them just so that I can use the phone overseas. Verizon only offers rental GSM phones for (get this) $3.99 a day, plus the minutes. What a rip off! With Cingular, I just need to sign up for regular domestic service (w/ a 2 yr contract) and I can add the international service for like $6.00 a month while I'm gone. Best thing is, I can transfer my old Verizon cell # and have it w/me. I thought of going to the Ebay site and getting an unlocked phone. I asked all my friends for their old phones to see if they took Sim cards and could be unlocked (no luck).I'm not completely decided, but Cingular is looking pretty good and I've been losing a lot of faith in Verizon for some time now.

If you're looking for a domestic carrier for use overseas, check out T-Mobile. They don't charge anything extra to use international roaming. Their phones are all GSM, and you can get a 4-band RAZR free from wirefly.com

Hi,
I would purchase a cheap pay as you go phone and then get people to phone you from the US. You will not be charged for receiving calls and people phoning you can add on cheap international calling for about $3 a month from their long distance carrier (or they could use that 10 10 220 thing that's always being advertised). You can always phone people and ask them to phone you back, or text them and ask them to phone you. This is the method I use when in UK and Greece.
Carolena

I hope I can provide information here that will help others make a decision about the best way to go if you want to have a cell phone while in Europe. Heaven knows I have spent enough time figuring this out!

Can making a cell phone decision be any more confusing?!? After reading everyone's advice, keeping myself up at night trying to decide what to do (we got ripped off on our European trip last summer--ended up w/a $500 charge due to hidden fees), and spending more time thinking about this than about sightseeing (crazy!), I decided to get a grip and sit down with pencil, paper, and calculator and make a chart comparing several options to see what would be best, leaving opinion out of it. These cell phone companies price everything very differently so it is extremely difficult to compare them at first glance (one has a low phone rental fee but high per-minute rate, another has low per-minute rates but high phone rental fee, etc.) Beware, consumer!

A little terminology for others who are cell phone impaired: A SIM card is the part of your cell phone that connects you with a service. It's your phone's software; the phone itself is the hardware. To be able to use a cell phone on your trip, you need both.

First, call your cell phone provider. (If you have Verizon, I can save you this step--forget it). Find out from your provider if you have a cell phone that is an unlocked GSM phone with 90/1800 mHz bands (I sound like I know what I'm talking about, don't I?). If the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, you can just purchase a SIM card from united-mobile for $59 (includes shipping and 40 min. of talk time from western Europe) and put it in your phone. If, however, you don't have this type of phone (such as all Verizon phones), you have to get yourself a phone AND service. That's what I needed.

For basis of comparison on my chart, I used a scenario of a 3-week western European Baltic trip with 60 min. of talk time (excludes Russia &amp; Poland where none of these rates from any company applies). If you plan to talk less than 60 min., you'll have to do your own comparison because the most cost-effective way for you will be different...remember those variations in the per-minute charges? Anyway, here's how it turned out using my scenario of 3 weeks in the Baltic talking 60 min.:

Option 1: RENT THE CELL PHONE ALONG W/SERVICE. EZ Wireless and Road Post, two providers I looked at, would cost slightly over $200 (includes all fees including shipping). Votaphone, which is what Verizon recommended I use when I called them about this, costs a lot more. (There are, of course, a lot of other services you can check out, should you have no life and lots of time on your hands.)

Option 2: BUY AN UNLOCKED CELL PHONE FROM A REPUTABLE SELLER ON E-BAY AND PURCHASE THE NECESSARY SIM CARD FROM ANOTHER SITE (per others' advice here, I looked at united-mobile). My cost would be about $180 (you were right, Robespierre--it is less expensive than the rental services).

Finally, Option 3: PURCHASE A PHONE AND SERVICE FROM THE SAME PROVIDER. Mobalrental was recommended by Rick Steves and MSN and--for my purposes--turned out to be the best option. This would cost $149 and includes all necessary adapters (worth a few bucks). It costs less than options 1 &amp; 2 and I'll be able to keep the phone and use it on future trips. In fact, I decided to pay $50 more than the $149 cost I mentioned above in order to get a phone that could also be used in Alaska, Canada, and the U.S. (the phones from the other plans I mentioned above don't work anyplace except western Europe). This means I can use it to make calls from the airports here in the U.S. and can leave my regular cell phone home...and it will work on my next trip (to Alaska). This put the cost almost equal with rental option #1 but I get to keep the phone, which--because I plan to travel in the future--will save lots of money on my next trip. Another plus for me was that I will have time before my trip to get comfortable with the phone--it won't arrive the day before I leave because I have to watch how many days I keep it in an effort to keep the cost down. That happened last year--we were paying by the day so we had it delivered the day before we left. We arrived in Rome and I ended up spending our first hour there not sightseeing but talking to a customer service rep who didn't speak English-- I couldn't get the phone to work per the manual!

One additional note--When figuring the costs, I included the fee my daughters' cell phone provider (Verizon) charges to get international roaming so they can call us (in our case, Verizon charges $3.99/mo. and you can cancel at anytime--no minimum # of months (the only piece of good news from Verizon relative to international calling). If you plan to make all your calls outgoing, this won't matter; just be sure to tell people who might call you to check it out first with their provider because they could get socked with high fees.

Whew!!! I hope I haven't confused anyone and maybe helped.

While a SIM card for the country you are visiting typically has the best rates, one drawback that it expires if not used within a set period of time (two to eight months for the ones I had considered). Since we visit Europe annually, those SIM cards did not make sense for us.

This year, I discovered a roaming SIM card. The rates are a bit higher (e.g.: $0.59/minute for calls from France to the US and for calls within France, free incoming calls), but the card does not expire for a year from your last call. That call could even be within the US ($1.15/minute). The phone number that you receive is a UK number.

The card is a Passport Sim Card:
http://www.telestial.com/view_produc...T_ID=MSIM-PP01

I requested unlock codes for our Motorola quad band phones from Cingular and will simply use the Passport SIM cards while we are in France for our upcoming trip.

patth...

Did you consider incoming calls in your calculations?

OK let me see if I got this straight.

I already own a cingular phone (2 actually my DH's and mine) and I did have the int'l feature turned on in March on both phones because my neice took my DH's phone to Italy w/her on her honeymoon. I was mis-informed by cingular that even with the int'l feature on both phones the cingular to cingular was free...

Not so...My bill was $812.00 over my base bill that I normally pay. Beware who you talk to at cingular. I called cust serv to set this up. Afterwards when the bill came in I learned that you need to specifically talk to the international department and that regular cust service while they try to be helpful apparently are not clear on how it actually works.

Now in Sept I go to France.

If what you guys are saying is all I need to do is buy a sim card from France and put it in.

I already know my phone works in europe so do I need to call cingular and have the int'l feature turned back on or is my phone already unlocked.

I am understanding that my phone is unlocked and once I take my sim card out...cingular is out of the picture and dosen't even know what I am doing. I then put in new sim and the phone should work.

Is all the above true or am I still confused?

Still following these excellent discussions. Here's my (really naive) question: Is there an important comparison between Cingular and T-Mobile with regard to black-out spots, or weakness of signal, or number of towers, etc. in Europe? In other words can one of those be more powerful or more dependable than the other? Thanks. J.

jmw

I worried about that same thing when I switched from nextel. I was getting very negative feed back on both but more so on T-Mobile. I was told it depended what area you were in.
At first my cingular was about the same as my nextel in regards to dropped calls and clarity. Since I got my cingular last Dec they put in another tower in my area and I have since had the best service I have had since I have owned a cell phone in 1992. I first was with Alltel for years then switched to Nextel and now cingular, so I stay with a company a long time and am aware of each ones pitfalls. My Nextel wouldn't even work in many parts of Arkansas where I go to visit friends every year. My cingular works everywhere I have been thus far.

I can't tell you about T-Mobile so maybe someone here can enlighten you on their reliability.

Cingular vs. T Mobile in Europe...should be exactly the same as they use the same roaming partners. When you are in say the UK you are not using a T Mobile US or Cingular tower, you may be using a Vodafone UK tower and your coverage will be that of Vodafone UK and in almost all cases you can select the roaming partner although each network might have its own preferred partner.

Cingular charges $1.29/minute vs. T Mobile 0.99/minute both to make and receive calls...for somethng like $6.99/month (or is it $3.99 I don't remember) cingular reduces its price to the same as T Mobile US for international roaming.

As I've always said, if your use of the mobile phone is simply to be reachable in emergencies it's convenient if you are on either Cingular or T Mobile and have a tri band phone.

But even that is not so simple...for a variety of reasons, Cingular in the USA operates on 850 and 1900 bands...so its tri band phones will have 850, 1800, 1900. It will work adequately in the big cities of Europe but lacking the 900 band, in many areas of Europe you will not get a signal.

Up until recently, when T Mobile US sold a tri band phone it was a real world tri band namely it had 900/1800/1900 with both European frequencies. Unfortunately, T Mobile US to enhance its converage in the US, has begun allowing roaming on some gsm partners which use 850 and tri bands they are selling now generally come with 850/1800/1900 which are, at least to me, next to useless for use throughout Europe. Nokia phones, particularly, cause a problem as from the model number it is not clear whether you have the North American tri band or the real world tri band (the model numbers for North American consumption have a b such as the Nokia 3220B but they never tell you that, you have to research the specs very carefuly).

The other consideration, and the reason I asked the question earlier, has to do with receiving of calls and is very important.

On a local prepaid European sim plan, the caller pays. Therefore, for example, if you have a UK sim and are in the UK, if somebody calls you they pay a higher rate and you pay nothing like in nothing...there is a whole brohaha going on in Europe now as the eu wants to extend this free reception of calls throughout the eu and the operators, to whom high international roaming rates is a cash cow are fighting like the dickens against this new &quot;intrusion&quot; by the eu into their internal policies. As it is now, if you have a UK sim, if you go to France, you pay to both make and recieve calls at very high rates. In response to the eu threat, some of th european carriers have begun to lower their roaming rates on their local prepaids.

Now my objection to mobal, which is basically O2 UK rebranded, is their rates are very close to T Mobile US and Cingular rates and they charge for both making and receiving calls except in the UK where you get the free reception of calls.

The international cards, such as united mobile, with the free reception of calls present a unique opportunity provided you understand it. With united mobile (and some others) you get free reception of calls throughout almost all of Europe east of Russia. The caveat is the number you have is in Liechtenstein (country code 423) and some long distance carriers in the United States and in Europe have raised their rates to call Liechtenstein to ridiculous levels. However, as of today, if you have the $1/month AT&amp;T internaional plan, their price to Liechtenstein mobiles is only 11¢/minute far cheaper than the 30¢/minute charged for calls to most other European mobiles.

The other big advantage of the free reception of calls is a firm called callbackworld (www.callbackworld.com)...with this company, you set up an account for free, no monthly charges or anything like that, and they give you a number to call in the USA (this is called the triggering number)...when you call that number you hear a ringing tone and you hang up. No charge because the call has not been completed..seconds later you get a callback on your mobile phone you keyed to the trigger number (in this case the United Mobile number)...no charge from United Mobile as you are receiving and you make the call. At present the charge from callbackworld to call from Liechtenstein mobiles (which is what you are charged wherever you are) to the US is 14¢/minute timed to the second...talk for 30 seconds and you pay 7¢...talk for 61 seconds and you pay 15¢...there were questions of the reliability previously but it seems to be working pretty reliably right now...some say connections are not all that great as they use internet providers but I haven't had any trouble. Some European mobile operators have tried to block calls (Logos can speak of that) but at this point in time it seems to be functioning adequately. At the same time, also for free, they give you something called a PIN2DEST. They give you a US toll free number that you can give out to your friends and when a friend calls that number if they enter a pin you provide, the call rings through at the above noted rate of 14¢/minute.

To me, and I emphasize to me, being reachble on the mobile phone is absolutely important. As a matter of fact, with call forwarding available to me on my landline which I use at home anyway to forward to my mobile phone, I have one universal number, my home number. If I'm in Switzerland and have call forwarding set to United Mobile, the call goes through (and AT&amp;T connections are excellent and quick)...the caller pays to call my local number and I pay 11¢/minute.

I know there are those who think they don't want to be reachble while on holiday and I respect their opinion on this. Also some people just want the most convenient way and it doesn't matter if it cost them a few extra dollars. To me as I travel a great deal and for example have friends in London and visit them several times a year, it is awesome.

And it is important to keep in touch with development regarding the roaming situation in the eu which might change the best way.

But what will be ture is that with an unlocked gsm phone with the 900 and 1800 frequencies, no matter what happens, you will be in a position to take advantage of whatever comes down the line.

&gt;cingular works everywhere I have been thus far.
You havn't been to many places in the US. ;-)
When it comes to coverage in Europe, there is no difference, simply because both conpanies roam on most european networks. That means both can be connected to the same network cell of the same european network at the same time and place with the same quality. The price may differ!

xyz123

True I haven't been all over the US, but I live in Florida and have been to GA, Ar, TN, KY, OH, MI, Il, SC and a few others I think and again..no problems..no dead zones or dropped calls, thus far...

As for the european rates...I have my bill right here from when my neice went to Italy in March. They charged her phone ( I let her use my hubby's) $5.99 for the int'l feature and my phone $3.99 for the int'l feature since no calls from my phone would originate in europe. I turned these features on just before she left and then off again after she returned home.

As for the minutes. Her phone was charged .99 cents per minute for all incoming and outgoing calls to either USA or in Italy. My phone when calling her was not charged anything to make a call to her or to receive a call from her because I had the int'l feature turned on on my phone.

HOWEVER, Both her phone and my phone were charged .50 cents for pics sent not received. She was also charged .50 cents for each txt msg as well either incoming or outgoing.

This is not how I understood this was going to be until I got my bill and spent over an hour on the phone with cingular having them explain all charges on my bill to me exactly.

I have contacted callbackworld and here is their reply to me:

Patricia,
Firstly, the least expensive thing you can do while in France is
either use our callback system from a land phone, or, use a good
phone card. If you want to travel with and use a cell phone you
will need to modify your own phone by taking out the little SIM
card that is in and replacing it with another that will turn it into a
European phone. This is a very common practice and, though
you must check that your phone is a GSM phone, most Cingular
phones are today.

You can turn your phone into a French mobile phone and the
rate will be 46.3 cents a minute to call the US. Better still, you
can turn it into a Liechtenstein number (no joke) and the rate
becomes 14 cents a minute. Incoming calls are free and if the
latter selection you can &quot;roam&quot; for free (ie, use it) in many other
countries. A roaming charge is something like you pay now
when traveling with your unmodified Cingular phone.

You can read about these things on an internet forum at:
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/
You will no doubt read about us there as we have a lot of
customers using the Riiing Global SIM card, the Liechtenstein
one. We do not sell SIM cards but we refer interested persons to
this site, which specializes in them.
http://interneka.com/affiliate/AIDLi...&amp;AID=17477

Hope that helps.

Barry
Callback World


So I think I will do both so if I just want to chat I will use the callbackworld from a land line in my hotel and for calling on the road I will use the Liechtenstein SIM card.

Wow...Barry is really on top of things...and BTW he is great and has worked with me in resolving some difficulties and is well aware how much we push his service on prepaidgsm.net...

Customer service at callbackworld.com is excellent.....

Thanks very much for replying to my questions. (I still drive around with a Motorola bag phone I bought ten years ago.) I visited the T-mobile website to see if I could understand the options (courage gained from you folks), and here are a couple more snags: When you place a call in Europe, do you first have to determine which band to use or is it automatic somehow? Second, the T-mobile coverage maps contain a chart of various 'carriers' and their coverage. Do you have to select a carrier when you arrive? Counting on your patience. J.

Just to clarify a couple of things that might not be clear...
1. Riiing (note 3 i's) was always branded by united mobile separately from its own service. About 6 months ago it was also consolidated into one big happy family and riiing is now called united mobile.

2. United mobile sim cards are readilly available at www.united-mobile.com.

3. The cards can now be denominated in euro, US dollars and sterling..recharging is very simple at the web site too.

4. Callbackworld would be worthless if you are roaming with either cingular or T Mobile US as you don't get the free reception of calls. It is the free reception of calls that makes the system work.

5. To use callbackworld from your hotel room, you would have to have a direct dial number in your room and the call to number has to be set either by calling cbw or via the internet.

But as noted, their customer service is excellent and Barry indeed will do most anything to assist you.

thanks xyz123

As you know sorting this out has not been an easy task so I feel better that you have worked with Barry over at callbackworld...the vote of confidence in him is very encouraging.

Although his advice seemed very good to me on the surface...until you try and find out for yourself your never really sure...but this helps me feel more confident.

As you also know we will need to keep on top of this because in the ever changing world of cell phones, services and technology we will probably be seeing a lot of changes over the next few years so next year al this maybe all wrong and not the best way to go...you never know....

I ment to add that this was a very costly lesson for me to learn..$812 to be exact...$812 can make a lot of people wake up and try and figure out a better way. Hopefully, my $812 lesson can be passed on to others planning on traveling in europe with their cell phone.

jmw44..

Good questions...most modern tri band and quad bands you do nothing to select the frequency. I will simplify what happens with modern phones...previously you had to select the frequency (and I still have a couple of old Motorolas where this was necessary)...

Basically when you turn on a mobile phone it boots up much like a computer. The first thing it looks for is if there is an authorized sim card in the phone (assuming we are talking about gsm phones of course)...this is where companies can lock their phones. If the phone is locked say to Cingular it will only continue on if there is a Cingular sim card in the phone otherwise you get a message unauthorized sim card....when the phone is unlocked the line of code in the boot up sequence is removed and any sim card will do.

Assuming it passes this test, the phone then looks for your home carrier, it may take a few seconds and if it finds it, the phone registers and you will see say Cingular in the window and the phone has registered on your network and voila you're in.

Now when you roam in Europe, let's say you're roaming on a Cingular phone in the UK....you land at Heathrow and after clearing immigration and customs (use of mobile phones in the customs and immigration areas is illegal) you turn on the phone...okay the phone has an authorized sim card and it looks for a Cingular signal, none exists...it then starts knocking at the door so to speak of various mobile providers changing the frequencies if necessary saying (figuratively speaking of course), &quot;Hello I am your friendly Cingular US sim card, will you take me in?&quot; And each provider checks its data base to see if it has an agreement with Cingular and if Cingular is authorizing your use of the card (international roaming is activated) if it says no, it goes to the next and tries again. In the case, for example, almost all of the mobile operators do allow roaming on Cingular so it will register on the first carrier it tries...this could be Vodafone UK...you will know the phone has registered if you see the name of a carrier in the window...you need do nothing. (just as an aside, different carriers have different preferred networks in various countries, not that it matters on current US international roaming plans...surprise surprise T Mobile US's preferred roaming partner in the UK is....ready for this...T Mobile UK which is why high charges for international roaming is a farce but that's another story for another day)...and you can manually choose a provider (as my own symbolic protest I use my T Mobile US phone to get lots of sms messages of baseball and football scores which are free to receive and deliberately set the phone to any carrier other than T Mobile UK) but that doesn't affect the rates.

All this takes place transparently to you so basically if your phone is enabled for international roaming when you turn it on, it will register after a few seconds on some network.

xyz123--No, I planned on mostly outgoing calls since that's the bulk of what we will use it for. My husband calls his office and I call the kids, usually dashing off calls when it's convenient to us based on our schedule--would hate our phone to ring while we're at the Hermitage or another site. I have my phone turned off more than it's turned on due to this plus the phone won't work once the ship leaves port (I know about satellite phones, which are way too expensive), so arranging incoming calls is impossible. It's easier for us to call home than home to call us because we know everyone's schedule and when we are likely to get them on the phone--they have no clue where we'll be and when (we don't even know). Home knows to call us only if an emergency. I suppose we could play that &quot;I'll call you and you call me right back&quot; game but as I said, I already spent too much time on this topic and created a probable scenario based on how we would use a phone. F.Y.I: for others: Incoming calls on EZ Wireless are 1/2 of outgoing and using united-mobile's SIM card gives you free incoming.

Thanks, xyz! You are a good teacher! J.

I appreciate all the inputs here.
I am also looking for the most cost effective way to stay in touch with our collage age son, who will be traveling this summer throughout Europe. After which we plan to meet him there.

Fortunately, we already have two Siemens GSM phones (S40 &amp; S46) left from our subscription with Singular.

What I was plannng to do is.
1. unlock the two units ($20 - $25 a piece).This way no having to rent or buy another one.
2. As it was recommended here, buy 2 sim cards from united-mobile and just insert them in.

After reading patth and thevegobondLady horrible experiences, I prefer not having to deal with these phone companies. Rather buy a card with no string atached.

To save money for us calling our son from U.S., I plan to use the cheap services of internet phone skype (www.skype.com), which we are already using. ($0.03 / min to Europe, including to Mobile phones)
We intent to use the cell phone while ourselves are in Europe.

I would very much like to read if anyone has a better idea.

thanks
Meir

Do the phones have both gsm 900 and 1800 frequencies? That is the key issue...also the ld provider, does it have cheap rates to Liechtenstein cell phones.....doesn't matter where in Europe your son is you pay the rate to a Liechtenstein cell and some of the ld carriers have very very high per minute rates.

xyz,
I just checked the spec's on these phones.

S40 has: GSM900 Class 4; GSM1800 Class 1; &amp; GSM1900 Class 1

S46 has: GSM 900 Class 4; GSM 1900 Class 1; TDMA 800 Class IV; TDMA 1900 Class IV.

You point of expensive calls to Lichtensein is an interesting one. I need to research it.

btw. I run into this Israeli website which offers a very attractive service. has anybody used their services.
http://www.amigo-us.com/index.cfm

Is there still a semaphore network that covers most of Europe?

I'm wondering if someone could clear something up for me. Here in our area the GSM coverage is pretty bad, so we use a non-GSM company for our mobile phone use. I've noticed, though, that this company (US Cellular) and all the others in the area offer GSM-capable phones for use with their networks, such as the Razr. Are these phones somehow disabled for GSM use? Is is possible to get them unlocked then buy a SIM for Europe? Right now I'm looking at picking up a phone on Ebay, but if I could get it unlocked, I could get a Razr from US Cellular for about $50 (with their contract).

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