I was wondering which international sim has the best functioning sms to us network such as Cingular and t-mobile. and the best price and if possible free incoming the sim card will most likely be used in africa or maybe the middle east. any suggestions would be appreciated

As to sms international interchange, there's usually a simple relationship: if there's a roaming agreement between two networks, SMSes go both way. No agreement only voice calls are possible.

For your destinations theoretically Hop might be OK but nobody has made it yet to send and receive SMS... :P

MOST of the European carriers have FREE INBOUND SMS world-wide, even on the prepaid side. Not true for T-MO unless you have an SMS plan and then it will use your free messages for INBOUND.

My brother-in-law, a German who lives in Australia and who travels quite a bit between AU and Europe and places in-between, claims his German D1 card via SMS is his "roaming" phone. He did travel to Egypt, but we did not SMS him there. NOW SENDING SMS from the foreign country is another matter.

That is the extent of my knowledge.

Stan

i know with t-mobile its 15 cents for international sms and with cingular 20 cents

It's not a SIM but I'm a big fan of smsBug. Most European SIMs have free incoming SMS, so combine smsBug with a card that has GRPS (e.g. Wind) and you can do quite well.

well my brother would most likely be using it in diffrent places in africa he might be using it in diffrent places in africa most likely kenya, nigeria or somewhere in asia

Yeah. I'm not sure I'd trust the required GPRS roaming throughout Africa and Asia.

I see you mentioned Nigeria. Well on a visit to Nigeria last year. I used MTN Nigeria. SMS worked flawlessly! Incoming calls and SMS were free of course. I SMS'ed mostly to Tmobile (USA) and did not have any problems. Cost was approximately 10 cents per SMS. GPRS was not available then, but it is now. Actually all the four carriers there now have GPRS (some are offering it free), and they all have roaming too. So, he can just buy a sim in Nigeria and just roam with it if it's mostly for SMS. Pretty much all providers (don't know about the USA carriers though) offer free incoming SMS when roaming.

yea my mom would want the number before hand so id have to order it online i also noticed hop requires a phone that supports soft-sim

I carry a Blackberry on Cingular's global roaming plan so I don't worry about SMSs. I just send e-mails to the phones since the one thing US mobiles do right is provide you with an e-mail address.

In the Middle East and AFrica, 09 is the best. It has the longest list of free incoming calls. For example, I discovered that at least official Riiing doesn't work in Lebanon.

Here is 09's list of free incoming calls in the Middle East and Africa.


Benin, Guinea, Madeira, Malaysia, Sudan, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Congo, El Salvador, Faeroes, Gabon, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritius, Mozambique, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Bahrain, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Madagascar, Moldova, Namibia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Senegal, Seychelles, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Yemen


This is a quick and very dirty edit of the list. You will find some stuff in their that is wrong. For example, I don't have a clue where the Seychelles Islands are -- I've heard great things about them, but they may be South Pacific. I deleted the obvious countries, but I cannot keep track of all the Africa nations any more. With respect to the Middle East, it also becomes difficult. Is Pakistan part of the Middle East? I think it is probably part of Asia, but it is a Muslim nation with borders on Middle Eastern nations.

Do you pay for those e-mailed SMSes?

That's right. But 09 must be used coupled with another SIM (possibly Blackberry, as you said) for SMSing since SMSes are probably not enabled in 09 yet

Really dirty, I agree :D (couldn't you look at the map first???).
Madeira - close to Africa but this island is a part of Portugal
Malaysia - rather Far East
Sweden - Europe!!!
El Salvador - Central America
Faeroes - Europe (islands on Atlantic, Danish autonomic non-EU territory)
Kyrgyzstan - Central Asian former Soviet republic; might be OK but not sure if "Middle East" refers to the post-Soviet area.
Moldova - eastern Europe, between Romania and Ukraine

Indian Ocean, I think it might be considered as a African country.

Stu, please... Pakistan IS a part of Asia. Middle East, Far East (and Near East, the term still alive in e.g. Poland) are rather political, not geographical names.

Russia and Turkey spread over Asia and Europe. The same "feature" is sometimes attributed to to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Egipt is both in Africa and Asia.
Indonesia and East Timor are sometimes considered to be both in Asia and Oceania. Cyprus is traditionally a part of Europe but in fact it might be considered as an Asian island.

OT, my general conclusion is that, in order to be specific, we shouldn't use region names but country names.

We use "Near East" as well in Italy! :) Or at least so thay taught me at school! :D
Anyway I think nowadays middle-east is the arabian-muslim block (our near-east), inside which there are exceptions (Israel is not muslim of course). Former Soviet republics of the Caucasus can be included, geographically they are middle/near East; while the 5 *stan could be considered middle/far East. It's always complicated, I prefer to refer at Asia, Europe or just the physical geographic names like Caucasus, Caspian and so on! ;)

Republics of the Caucasus have never been considered to be in the middle/near East here. It's supposed to be Lebanon, Israel, Syria etc., when we talk about middle/near East here. Different countries, different region separations... :P Caucasian republics (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) are geographically considered to be in Asia, however they are participating in many European organizations (including UEFA etc. :) ), I guess it's mostly because of the Christian religion dominating in Georgia and Armenia (so, any Euro- is much more modern and popular there than any Asian :) ), which is similar to Cyprus, while Azerbaijan is close to Turkey, which is a sort of Euro fan too. :D

So, it's better to talk about countries, I guess... :)

Me and my big mouth :wacko: Sweden? Ugh. :( I'm sure that they'd love to know that they were in the Middle of the Desert next winter.

Turning to your other questin, I have unlimited Blackberry data worldwide on the plan. If you have a friendly Blackberry Enterprise Server that means just about any data you want. Obviously, there is some sort of puke test, e.g. I'm not going to start downloaded movies from Bit Torrent, but e-mail should be fine.

I have my US mobile with the optional Fast Forward which gives me unlimited call forwarding minutes. When I leave the US, I call forward my mobile to it EXCEPT when I am in my overseas apartment or in an office building I regularly work in. Then the device is call forwarded to a V-O-IP line. I a work on top of some restaurants and my signal makes it down there and to the that great Emirate Coffeehouse -- Starbucks. Combining that, about 50% of my calls come in VOIP which makes the calls free for me. That brings my per minute rate down to roughly 7 cents a minute which isn't bad for this part of the world.

Nothing to shame about :). Do you remember that once Slovakia and Ukraine on the Hop Mobile site were assigned to Asia and finally someone of us mailed them and stand them corrected :). It looked to me as I would have lived almost in Asia (I live about 85 km to the west of the Polish-Ukrainian border :))

Oh if that interest you on 3 ITA international roaming page Belarus and Ukraine are in Asia, so for them you still live 85Km from Asia! :D

Is Russia in Asia there as well? :) If it's not then Belarus would be an Asian enclave inside Europe! :lol:

Yes, Russia is Asian of course, and Kaliningrad is an Asian enclave inside Europe! :D

It's amazing how Euro-Asian border is moving :D The Kaliningrad region was until 1945 a part of Germany (East Prussia), western Belarus belonged to Poland until 1939, western and south-western Ukraine belonged to Poland until 1939, and to Czechoslovakia (Hungary during the WW2) and Romania until 1944.
One could say that one of the results of WW2 was moving the borders of the continents :D. As to 3 ITA, they assigned Turkey to Europe and set the border between North and South America south of Mexico :).

Returning from off-topic: it seems then the international SIMs with the best coverage in Africa and Near/Middle East region of Asia, namely Hop and 09 will not meet jervin123's basic requirement - they have no functional SMS service :(.

These designations can change with time. In the US the "Southwest" used to be Mississippi (now considered in the South East). These days, the Southwest starts 1500 km farther west.