UM works in South Africa but the only card that appears to work in Namimbia is 09. Neither the Isle of Mann one nor the Estonian one seems to work

Try here:

http://www.orate.co.uk/acatalog/glob...-sim-card.html

Also Hop (http://www.hopmobile.com/) works both in Namibia and S.Africa but incoming calls cost $0.35/min and outgoing $0.95/min + $0.20 setup fee.

You may want to consider the MTC Tango Prepaid GSM Sim card (offered by MTC of Namibia): MTN Tango Prepaid Offer Their gsm network is on 900 Mhz according to gsmworld.com.

They do offer roaming in South Africa if they manually switch their phone to Vodacom (they can also recharge their MTN SIM card in South Africa by SMS but best to buy vouchers in Namibia).

You could ask their customer service dept if they would sell you a SIM card in advance:

HEAD OFFICE
Tel: +264 61 280 2000
Fax: +264 61 280 2124
Cnr. of Malcolm Spence & Reginald Walker Str.

Any Questions, queries or comments can be directed to feedback@mtc.com.na

Hello to you all,
thanks for all the useful information. I'll read trough it and see how i can get a card for my parents :-)

have a nice weekend!

Chris

EDIT: Got the 09-card yesterday from orate and tried it yesterday.
Voice works fine, for inbound calls i found a provider which charges 16c a minute with good quality. Just SMS do not seem to work (in- and outbound). But i tried only on T-Mobile network yet. By the way: the SMSC stored on the SIM-card is a swiss number not one from iceland.

I can confirm that both the UM and 09 cards work in South Africa. The UM cards picks up all three networks while the 09 card only picks up CellC.

By far the best prepaid service in SA is Vodacom. Once you are here the cards cost less that $1 and then you pay for airtime. There are quiet a few packages available.

According to the Vodacom website the prepaid service roams in Namibia. I have never been to Namibia so I cannot confirm it.

I lived if South Africa for a quite some time. And last time I was there,is March of this year. 0044 numbers should roam on Vodacom and MTN. Cell C has some network in big cities, otherwise it roams on Vodacom. In countryland it looks like MTN has better coverage. The daytime calls are quite expensive by European standards around R2.50-3.00 a minute. International SMS R1.60-1.80. Good tip cheapest Prepaid packages were in CNA stores. R 2.00 each.

I've now tested 09 in the Isle of Man (Manx Telecom) - works OK, including making calls directly and the 092 balance line. No SMS yet. I'll be trying it in a few other European countries in a few weeks.

One point when making calls with 09 (or possibly most of the roaming sims) - use the full international code like +4416246nnnnn when calling a number, not a local shortform like 6nnnnn (since the call is not coming from locally).

Neither incoming, nor outgoing?

I've never got 09 SMS to work either in or out in any country so far (but I've only tried three). This includes SMSing to/from numbers on networks they have roaming agreements with (such as Cingular and Manx Telecom).

... and also for sending sms from it - I forgot and made the mistake of trying to send from CallKey to a UK mobile with just 07786, not +447786