Sprint iPhone 5s / 5 in Italy
 

My wife and I plan to travel to Italy in April and we have some questions regarding cell phones, specifically Sprint branded iPhone 5s (mine) and 5 (hers). We have contacted Sprint to have our sim slots unlocked for international travel and we plan to purchase SIM cards once we arrive in Florence. We will need voice coverage in order to keep in touch with our children who will remain stateside, but we would like to have data in order to help navigate the city. From what I've read voice should not be much of an issue, however I'm having trouble finding much information on the data coverage.


Several questions:

Has anyone traveled to Italy with a Sprint iPhone? From a bit of searching, it looks as though LTE bands 3 and 7 are used in Italy, but our phones only support LTE band 3. I'm curious if we'll be able to get data, and if so, what kind of speeds should we expect?

For anyone who has traveled to Italy with a Sprint iPhone 5 / 5s, which carrier did you choose? What was the coverage like?

Thanks in advance!

Oh, and I forgot to mention in the original post, we will be staying in Florence and in Rome mainly.

I don't have an iPhone, but my daughter has had every model that's come out since the iPhone 3. Hers were all AT&T phones, but I don't think that matters, as long as the phone is GSM compatible. She got all of them in the US, and she's used all of them in Italy. I don't think she's ever used LTE in Italy though, and really 3G should be adequate for the things you want to do.

You might be interested in the TIM Welcome Plan, offered by Italy's major cell phone provider, and designed specifically for short-term visitors. It has 200 minutes of talk time, including calls to the USA (and other countries), as well as 2 GB of data. The plan costs €20 for one month. It can only be added to new SIM cards, and it can't be renewed when the month is up. (This is to prevent Italians using it as their regular plan, as the price is better than what you could get as an Italian resident who makes calls to other countries.)

http://www.tim.it/showfile/TIM_Welcome_ENG.pdf

The other major provider is Vodafone. They don't have an equivalent to the TIM Welcome plan, but otherwise their plans are similar.

You probably only want one plan with data. For the other phone, there are cheaper plans. You could get a pay-as-you go plan for calls within Italy. If you and your wife will always be together, she wouldn't be making many calls from her phone, I would imagine. TIM has two pay-as-you-go plans for calls within Italy. TIM 12 costs 12 cents a minute, but with an 18-cent connection charge, so 30 cents for the first minute. TIM Zero Scatti costs 29 cents a minute with no connection charge, and it's charged by the second.

In all cases, the cost of a SIM card is €10, which includes €5 of initial credit. That's probably enough for a phone with the all-inclusive TIM Welcome plan, but you might need to add more to a phone with a pay-as-you-go plan. You can do this at any time.

For both phones, you should activate TIM International New, which will allow you to make calls to the US for 20 cents a minute with a 16-cent connection charge, almost the same price as a domestic Italian call. This plan is free to activate for new clients, so even if you use TIM Welcome, you should have it as a backup if you use up your 200 minutes. Note that if you don't activate it at the time you buy the SIM card, activation will cost you €5.

I think the data with TIM Welcome is only 3G, but, as I said, that should be sufficient for your purposes. That's all I have at the moment, although TIM is offering me 4G (or LTE) at a small additional cost right now. I'm not sure I want to pay even €1 a month extra, because I find my 3G data speed to be fine, and also, in the rural area where I live, I'm not sure I could even get 4G.

Coverage is excellent in places like Rome and Florence. Inside old buildings with thick stone walls, you sometimes need to stay near a window to get a good signal. In rural and mountainous areas, coverage may be spotty. Where we spend our summers, we can only get 2G at our house. I leave my phone on the windowsill to make the most of whatever signal there is. There's an excellent signal at the local cemetery, though!

Thank you for your response! 3G would definitely be fast enough to load maps or to do some light googling, and hopefully that will work but Sprint in particular uses a different technology for 3G than AT&T. The main concern is that the Sprint iPhone, particularly the 5 and 5s, are very different from the phones sold through AT&T and even Verizon in the US, and different also from the ones sold in Europe. On the other hand, it looks like the Sprint specific iPhone supports a lot of the same protocols and bands that the AT&T phone does (even protocols that Sprint doesn't use), and additionally even supports LTE band 3 popular in Europe (but not 7). The AT&T iPhone 5s does not support either LTE band 3 or 7, so would not support LTE in Italy as I understand it. I was just hoping that I could get confirmation that the Sprint iPhones worked in Italy for data, though I strongly suspect the answer will be yes.

I'll definitely look into those TIM plans! That sounds like a great option.

Thanks again!

I'm pretty sure it would work fine.

Another thought, if the 200 minutes of talk time on the TIM Welcome plan would cramp your style, you could also use Skype, Apple's Facetime (??) or Google Message service to talk to your kids. Since 2 gb is probably a good deal more data than you'd need, you can stretch the minutes by using your data for an internet talk service, that can also be used with wifi when you have it available.

Just as an update, we went with TIM. I had 4G coverage with my Sprint 5S, but the wife was only able to get 3G speeds with her iPhone 5. We found a promotional offer, got a sim card, 5 euros credit, 300 minutes talk, 300 texts, 1GB of data for 22 euros total each. I thought that was a very good deal, and the 4G data speeds were excellent. In fact, it was much much better than the hotel wifi at least in Florence.

Thanks again @bvlenci for all of your help!