<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'><span style='font-family:Arial'>I'm traveling to Israel in July for about 10 days. I have a Cingular 8700c (GSM) Blackberry phone. I'd need this primarily for Blackberry access. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,</span></span>

Hi,

I am an American living (mostly) in Dubai. I have a Cingular Blackberry and have used it without incident in most of the Middle East. I was in Tyre Lebanon last week and hooked on to an Israeli signal to download my e-mail. (Lebanon does not have GPRS roaming with Cingular so I went out of my way to get the signal). Roaming was flawless with the Israeli carrier. (I don't remember whether it was Cellcom or Orange).

Cingular offers an international roaming package for roughly twenty dollars a month more than the domestic one. It includes all you can eat Blackberry service. If you are a heavy data user this is the way to go. If you are not, "Blackberry data minus attachments is not a heavy load and it might not pay to add on the the roaming feature.

That said, I would NOT use my Cingular Blackberry for phone service. They will rob you blind. Israeli prepaid SIMs are readily available. Get your hands on a tribrand GSM phone and get one of those or alternatively a roaming SIM such as Riiing. Look at the prior threads on Riiing and Callbackworld. You'll only pay $0.14 a minute. In addition to this, you'll have coverage on all three GSM carriers in Israel (the two Israeli and one Palestinian).

Be sure to either hard forward your Cingular phone some place or switch off the voicemail. Cingular will hit you with a round trip roaming fee for calls sent to voicemail otherwise and that will add up quickly.

Stu,

Thank you very much for your insight.

I will also travel to Israel this summer, and i would like to use GPRS (50 MB would be great).

Which prepaid is best for data ?
And maybe also for call to Europe (otherwise i will use callback).
Thanks.

I've heard that Israeli prepaids do not include data. This, however, is hearsay.