traveling on a european cruise
 

Hello all. I am traveling on a Mediterranean cruise in novermber, and wanted to see what are the best options for a data plan. My current carrier is AT&T and I have a Blackberry Bold, and I have a USBConnect Mercury aircard, both of which have sim cards. I am assuming it would cost too much the days we are at sea, but we will also be in Rome, Athens, Malta, and Cairo. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I am new to this. Thanks!

It will cost a lot while at sea using the ship's network. Data will be quite slow anyway, since on the cruises I have been on, it's just GPRS. Not even EDGE. My advice would be to make your calls/data at the port cities. That will certainly not be cheap if roaming, but better than using the ship's tower.

There are easy options for picking up cheap "data ready" local SIMs at least in Italy and Greece. This is if you intend to do quite a bit of browsing and want to drop the price per MB significantly compared to what you pay on roaming with your home carrier. Otherwise if you just buy one SIM at your first port of call, lets say Italy, then it is likely that data roaming with it in Greece (and maybe Malta) will be cheaper than with your AT&T. At least for voice and SMS it will be much cheaper, as both countries have to adhere to the EU price caps.

However, I am less sure about what cheap data options are available on local prepaid SIMs in Egypt and Malta.

The data roaming rates will be pretty high. When in areas where high roaming charges are unavoidable (such as a cruise ship) I forward all calls to voicemail and leave a message asking the caller to contact me via SMS.

I just got off a cruise ship in the Med. In many places you will be able to get a selection of land based carriers while on the ship. While out to sea near Italy and the Greek coast I got a strong signal. You should too, especially when sailing through the Straits of Messina or near Islands. On my trip, I often set my EKIT SIM on Manual and got numerous choices to select either GSM or 3G networks. I did not use the EKIT SIM for data however.

While on the ship, I used the ships slow internet connections. They sold a 90 minute package that cost $49.00. It was fine for e-mails and short Internet sessions.

I was on a Baltic Cruise in August and had a few extra internet minutes left on my last night on board and tried a couple of VOIP calls as an experiment. The call quality was acceptable. I was very surprised.