Since my cell phone doesn't support the international standard I am looking into buying an international phone, possibly at this site - http://www.mobalrental.com/?source=0006DN07NMOBWEB
They have phones for either $49 or $99 depending on how many countries it supports. The per/minute charges vary but are around $2 - $3. This phone would be for short calls home or emergencies. Any better deals available?

Who is your regular provider?

You can get a Motorola quad band phone these days for less than $50

Mobalrental $49 phones are probably not the "best" deal, but I'm satisfied with the arrangement. I have T-Mobile and can use my phone in Europe for $0.99/min. I bought the $49 phone for hubby to carry. The per-minute rates while in France are a bit less than your example. We used our phones maybe 10 times for very short calls. The phone arrived promptly and the calls are billed to the credit card we used to make the purchase. I had a question and Mobal answered via email very quickly.

Thanks for the replies. I use Verizon for a service provider.

You could save a lot of money by buying an unlocked phone or one that you know how tpo unlock and then get the prepaid SIM cards once you arrive in the particular country...apparently brings the charges down to a few cents a minute.

I am willing to pay more per minute to keep my same phone number, etc., not worry about getting the local cards, letting people know my "new" phone number, etc. BUT that is a personal decision and the fact that I go overseas frequently is the rerason I bought a quad-band phone.

Lots of strategies and I'm not sure anybody ELSE's is necessarily correct for you.

My own provider (Cingular) charges about 95 cents per minute when I'm overseas...I could do it cheaper but I prefer to be lazy.

I purchased a tri-band unlocked gsm cell phone off of ebay for about $40. While, for some unknown reason failed to work in Paris, we had no problems with it in Portugal and England. We just purchased a SIM card at the airport in Portugal and recharged whenever we needed to.

Here is why the phone may not have worked in Paris and is worthwhile for people to be aware of...

For whatever the reason, in this case probably justified, the United States in many areas is very contrary minded. Mobile phones are no exception.

While 99% of the civilized world (and uncivilized world too) uses the technology known as GSM (Japan and South Korea are big notable exceptions as are some Latin American countries), the USA did not embrace this technology. The biggest mobile provider in the USA is Verizon and is most assuredly not GSM so their customers are kind of screwed if they want to use their phones internationally.

The two big GSM provers in the USA are T Mobile USA and Cingular...but now the frequency issue comes in and it can be a big problem. T Mobile USA uses the 1900 mhz. frequency for all its coverage while Cingular, late to the GSM game, for the most part uses 850 mhz. with some 1900 thrown in. European carriers use 900 and 1800.

In the beginning when T Mobile USA was the only GSM provider in the US, to enhance its service it offered international roaming. Because of the frequency issue, it began selling tri band phones with 900/1800/1900 which would work most anywhere.

Enter Cingular....when they began putting some of their gsm coverage on 850, they got some phone manufacturers to manufacture tri band phones with 850/1800/1900 to cover all their service in the US and providing some service in Europe. T Mobile began signing domestic roaming agreements with some carriers on 850 and therefore it began to offer phones with both 850 and 1900 to cover the entire USA with their roaming partners and so the tri bands they have sold recently are 850/1800/1900.

You really need both 900 and 1800 in Europe. The tri band 850/1800/1900 while not useless are hardly universal in Europe; many carriers are either 900 or 1800 in their individual countries and there are many areas say in France, mostly rural where there is no 1800 service (same thing in Ireland)...

Well if you are using the phone for roaming, it probably doesn't matter, the phone will seek out and ually be able to find a provider on 1800 if you are stuck with one of the bastardized 850/1800/1900 non world hones. However, if you buy a local sim, then you have to be careful. It is very possible the local sim you bought in France is one that exists almost entirely on 900 and your 850/1800/1900 phone was unable to register on that network while the networks you chose in Portugal had 1800 service.

This is a growing problem as peopple (and some sellers) are not aware of this and I have seen many phones advertised on ebay as "world" phones which are 850/1800/1900 as they were bought from Cingular and recently now from T Mobile. I have ready sorry account after sorry account on various forums of people finding their 850/1800/1900 phones not being able to work on various local networks in Europe and the problem is not the phones are locked which can be fixed but they have the wrong freuencies.

To make matters worse, if it is a Nokia phone then they use the same model numbers for the true world phones (900/1800/1900) and the bastardized US models (850/1800/1900)...technically the ones for the US have a letter B so while there is a model 3220 made for the world at large, the one sold in the USA techically is the 3220B but few of the people on ebay care or know or give a damn. And again, if you simply use the phone for international roaming with the rip off artists at T Mobile and Cingular and stick to the big cities, it won't matter.

The solution? Either, if you want the phone to get local sims, make sure it is 900/1800/1900 or get a quad band (850/900/1800/1900)...

Just to finish the story, there is a person on this forum who is very knowledgeable who wanted to save money so he bought the mobal phone they were offering at the time for $49 and then wanted to use a Virgin Mobile sim in the UK....aha, so he thought, I'm beating the system.

What he didn't realize and didn't discover till he arrived in the UK is that Virgin Mobile in the UK uses T Mobile UK towers and operates almost exclusively on 1800...his model was a 900 model (Mobal uses O2 towers which is preominantly 900 in the UK)...poor person he was left up the creek without a cell phone.

Check out those frequencies carefully.

Hi H,

>This phone would be for short calls home or emergencies. <

Which is why we bought the $49 Mobal phone.

You will have the same phone number forever. You are billed only if you accept or send a call.

ira - It does seem like the easy way out and really isn't all that bad for the short calls that I expect to be the norm. Harry

Have you thought about renting a global phone? I believe verizon charges $3.99 a day for the rental, with calls being about $1.50 per minute. They will deliver the phone to you via Fedex, and you return it the same way. It was very convenient on our last trip.

$4/day...$1.50/minute...what a rip off...Again, in the year 2006 renting a cellular phone makes no sense whatsoever...you can pick up a mobile phone that will work in Europe for around $30 and then it's your forever and forever...

As far as keeping your verizon number, you can procure local sims, open up an account with kall8 which will give you a US toll free number which will ring to your prepaid sim for 1/5 the price per minute and call forward from your verizon number to the kall8 toll free number and voila you've retained your US mobile number for your friends and a fraction of the cost.

Hi I recently bought a new cingular phone. It's a quad band and is supposed to cover most of the known world. Hope it works better than my wifes tri band that cingular did not activate last year as they were supposed to do.

The quad band should work fine.