Dear friends of PrepaidGSM,
after many years of bad studying and little working, at last, I succeeded in becoming a real mechanical engineer on last thursday evening! :beer: :beer: It took me too much time, but better late than ever, and I'm very happy to have finally graduated. That's the main reason why I didn't update much the site and didn't write much on the forum as well. In the future I don't know how it will change since I had the good luck to find a new job at once, so I'll be probably even busier than in the last month. Anyway, we'll see, surely it's very good for me to have a good job! ;)

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/1...5884ow2.th.jpg

In the meanwhile, I'm taking a 1 week holiday to celebrate my achievement and I'm flying tomorrow to Bratislava, Slovakia. I'll travel around the High Tatras, the East of SK and then south to Budapest. So, I leave you here with Andrea! :) Surely I'll tell you more about Slovakian and Hungarian prepaid cards and 3G networks when I come back! :)

Congratulations!!! :thumbup:
You really deserved a lot of Slovak :beer: :beer: :beer:

Congratulations on doing a fine job. May your nights on holiday be filled with beer and pretty women. :D Have a great time. :beer:

What a great man! :D

Congratulations!!! :beer: Hope Slovakia will never forget you as the great specialist! ;) By the way, you told me you would go to Russia if you got a good job. So... ? :)

PS. Nice photo! :D

I hope Effendi is having a great time.

Meanwhile, I went for about half a day, slightly extended by having to find a post office in Bratislava this morning to pay a speeding fine. When Effendi tells us about SIM discoveries, I wonder if he'll have seen Orangeclick.sk, which I saw on a poster and seems to have fairly cheap int'l calls.

Here I am back home!

Yes, I saw plenty of posters of Orangeclick.sk all around Slovakia, pity we couldn't meet in Bratislava, I was there yesterday for some hours, and I know where the Po?ta office is! :D

Anyway, I bought a normal "Prima" prepaid card from Orange and the international rates are exactly the same, and very cheap indeed. It was great to call back home at 5 SKK/min (? 0.135). Orange has almost a perfect GSM coverage and really a widespread 3G network too. PIty that Prima users cannot use the 3G (maybe Orangeclick yes, I have no idea), and also with Wind I couldn't register on it. I could register on T-Mobile SK 3G but no data connection was available, and it has coverage just in some parts of Bratislava only.

I had instead some problems in Hungary and I couldn't buy any prepaid card. In Budapest there seem to be no shops which sell prepaid cards! There's pleny of "GSM" shops which sell or repair phones, while you can get refills at newsstands but if you want a prepaid card you need to go to the official shops of the 3 operators. Walking around Pest I just found the Pannon one but it was so crowded that after 15 minutes of waiting (with no one speaking English inside) I preferred to enjoy the beauty of this city walking around and using United Mobile. I didn't see T-Mobile and Voda shops at all, but there were also no commercials of Voda, really incredible...

Outside Budapest it was much easier to find the 3 operators' shops since towns were small and shops were in the centre. Usually Voda had the best located ones (of course). But buying a card to use for 1,5 days was quite unuseful so I have no Hungarian cards. I had big problems with SMSbug as well there, with many "rejected" SMSes to one T-Mobile H number (of a pretty girl who I didn't meet!).
Talking about 3G networks, Pannon is the most widespread and I was always roaming on it with my Wind card. T-Mobile and Voda have some coverage in Budapest only as far as I saw. Speed was excellent both in 2.5 and 3G with Pannon and Wind.

Anyway Slovakia beats Hungary by far as far as concerning mobile networks (and O2 is coming with a 3G only one), while talking about pretty girls it's a hard match! :D

Congrats Effendi ;).....glad to hear that you fulfilled your career ambitions. Thanks for the roaming report.....I was in Trieste while you were away so I added some more insight for that easternmost fringe of Italy :D.

Congratulations but when did Italian universities give up on the traditional caps and gowns in favor of the bib and pot? :wacko:

Eheh, the bib and pot are not very traditional or official, it was just a nice friends joke! :D